The Rudolf Steiner Archive

In my second public lecture here, I tried, as far as is possible in a public lecture, to describe in broad outline the life of man between death and rebirth. We shall go more deeply into this subject in the next two lectures, in order to gain a clearer understanding of our life here in the physical world. The preparation provided by the previous lectures was necessary before we could go further. This course of lectures will provide the means whereby we can enter more deeply into this subject than was possible in the public lectures.

I have often said that if a person wants to know and understand the spiritual worlds—and these are the worlds in which we live between death and rebirth—he must make certain conceptions and ideas his own, which cannot be gained from experience here on earth, but which, if once gained, will be of infinite importance to life on the physical plane; and this importance will increase more and more.

To begin with, let me now explain one difference between the experience in the spiritual world and the experience on the physical plane, which when heard for the first time must seem astonishing and strange, so that we might easily think that these things would be difficult of comprehension. But the deeper we go in Spiritual Science, the more we shall find that these things become ever more comprehensible. When we live on the physical plane and are affected by the experiences of the physical plane, one thing must, upon recollection strike us forcibly. That is, that on this physical plane we are confronted with what we call reality, existence, being. One might say that the more unspiritual a person is, the more does he rely upon what he has before him on the physical plane as the ‘reality’ that presses in upon him. But as regards what we wish to acquire on the physical plane as ‘knowledge,’ knowledge of this reality, the case is different. As children we have to be taught to develop the capacities for acquiring the knowledge of the physical plane and then we have to work further and further. The acquisition of knowledge demands mental work. Nature, that is to say external reality, does not of itself yield up the contents of its wisdom and its laws; we have to acquire this knowledge. Indeed, all human striving after knowledge consists in actively acquiring from passive experience, the wisdom and the law that Nature contains.

Now matters are quite different when either by the exercises which lead to spiritual investigation, or by passing through the portal of death, we enter into the spiritual world. The relation of man to the surrounding spiritual world is not, under all circumstances, what I am now about to describe; but it is so in important moments, during important experiences. In our life on the physical plane we are not always striving after knowledge, for sometimes we pause in this labour. So also, what I shall now describe is not continually necessary in the spiritual world, but it is requisite and necessary for us at certain times. The astonishing thing is that man has no lack of wisdom in the spiritual world. A person may be a fool in the sense-world, but simply through his entrance into the spiritual world wisdom streams towards him in its reality. Wisdom that we acquire with trouble in the physical world, that we have to work for day after day if we wish to possess it, is already ours in the spiritual world, just as surrounding nature is ours in the physical world. It is always there, and it is there in the greatest abundance. To a certain extent we may say that the less wisdom we have acquired on the physical plane, the more abundantly does this wisdom stream towards us on the spiritual plane. But, we have a special task, with respect to this wisdom on the spiritual plane.

In recent lectures I told you that on the spiritual plane the ideal of humanity stands before us, the content of the religion of the Gods, and that we have to strive towards it. We cannot do this, if we are incapable of so exercising our will—that is, our feeling-will, our willing-feeling—that we continually diminish this wisdom, continually take something away from the wisdom which for ever streams towards us and which there surrounds us as the phenomena of nature do here. We must have the power to deplete more and more the wisdom which there comes towards us. Here, on the physical plane we have to become wiser and wiser; there we have to endeavour so to exercise our will and our feeling that we diminish and darken the surrounding wisdom. For the less we are able to take from it, the less strength do we find within us whereby to fill ourselves with the necessary forces to approach the ideal of humanity as real being. This approach has to consist in our taking more and more away from the surrounding wisdom. What we thus take away we are able to transform within us so that the transformed wisdom becomes the life-force which drives us towards the ideal of humanity,. This life-force we have to acquire during the period between death and rebirth. It is only by changing into life-force, the wisdom which flows into us so abundantly, that we can approach a fresh incarnation in the correct way. When we return to earth, we must have changed so much wisdom into life-force, we must have diminished the wisdom by so much, that we have sufficient organising spiritual life-forces to permeate the substance we receive through heredity from father and mother. Thus we have to lose wisdom more and more.

When we find a thorough materialist again after his death, one who on the physical plane did not recognise any reality in spirit, who said during his life, ‘All that you say about spirit is nonsense; your wisdom is nothing but fantasy; I will have nothing to do with it. I admit nothing but what is to be found in external nature’—in the case of such a person, when met with after his death, one sees wisdom stream towards him so abundantly that he cannot escape it. From all sides spirit streams towards him. To the same extent that he did not believe in spirit here, he is overflooded by it there. His task is now to change this wisdom into life-forces, so that he may produce a physical reality in his next incarnation. He is to produce what he called reality from this wisdom, he is to diminish this wisdom; but it will not permit itself to be diminished by him, it remains as it is. He is unable to form reality out of it. This dreadful punishment of the spirit confronts him, namely, that whereas in his last life here on the physical plane he relied only upon reality, whereas he entirely denied spirit, he is now unable to save himself, as it were, from spirit and he is unable to produce anything real out of this spirit. He is always faced with the danger of not being able to come again into the physical world through forces which he himself produces. He lives continually in the fear—‘Spirit will push me into the physical world and I shall then have a physical existence which denies everything that I recognised as true in my previous life. I shall have to allow myself to be thrust by spirit into physical reality, I shall not have produced reality by myself.’ That is a most astonishing thing, but it is a fact. To be a great materialist and deny spirit before death is the way to be drowned, as it were, in spirit after death and to find in it nothing of the only reality one had formerly believed in, A man is then choked or drowned in spirit.

These are ideas which we have to acquire more and more in the course of our. study of spiritual science; for if we do acquire them they lead us onward harmoniously even in physical life and they show us, to a certain extent, how the two sides of life have to supplement and balance each other. We form the instinctive desire really to introduce this balance into our life.

I might give you another example of the connection between physical and spiritual life. Let us take a concrete, individual example. Suppose we have told a lie to someone on the physical plane—I am speaking of actual cases. When we tell a lie to someone, it happens at a certain point of time and what I shall now describe as the corresponding event in the spiritual world also takes place at a certain point of time between death and rebirth. Let us suppose we have told a lie to someone at some particular time on the physical plane; then, during our sojourn in the spiritual world, be it through initiation or through death, there comes a certain time when our soul in the spiritual world is entirely filled with the truth we ought to have expressed. This truth torments us; it stands before us and torments us to the same degree in which we deviated from it when we told the lie. Thus one need only tell a lie on the physical plane in order to bring about a time in the spiritual world when we are tormented by the corresponding truth, the opposite of the lie. There the truth torments us because it lives in us and burns us, and we cannot bear it. Our suffering consists in our seeing the truth before us. But we are in such a condition that this truth gives us no satisfaction, no joy, no pleasure; it torments us. One of the peculiarities of our experience in the spiritual world is that we are tormented by what is good, by the things which we know ought to uplift us.

Take another example. In our life in the physical world we may be lazy in doing something which it is our duty to do industriously; then comes a time in the spiritual world when we are filled with the industry we lacked in the physical world. Industry most surely comes; it is alive in us when we have been lazy in the physical plane. The time comes when from inner necessity, we have to exercise this industry unconditionally. We devote ourselves to it entirely and we know that it is something which is extremely valuable; but it torments us, it makes us suffer.

Let us take another case which is perhaps less under the control of human volition, but depends upon other processes of life which go on more in the background of existence and are connected with the course of our karma; let us take the case in which we have passed through an illness. When in physical life we have had an illness which has caused us pain, we experience at a certain point of time in the spiritual world the opposite feeling, the opposite condition, namely, that of health. And this feeling of health strengthens us during our sojourn in the spiritual world to the same degree that the illness weakened us. This is an instance which perhaps may not only shock our intellect, like the other things we have mentioned, but it may enter much more deeply into the emotional aspect of our soul and irritate it. We know that the things of Spiritual Science must always be grasped through our feelings; but in this case we must remember the following. We must clearly understand that something like a shadow lies over this connection between physical illness and the corresponding health and strength we have in the spiritual world. The connection exists, but there is something in the human breast which prevents the feelings from rightly coming to terms with this connection. We must indeed admit this connection has another result when we really understand it, and this result may be described as follows:—

Let us suppose that a person takes up Spiritual Science and devotes himself seriously to it—not in the way in which other sciences are taken up. These may be studied theoretically; one may receive what they give merely as thoughts and ideas. Spiritual Science ought never to be taken up in this manner. It ought to become a spiritual life-blood within us. Spiritual Science ought to live and work in us; it ought also to awaken feelings through the ideas it gives us. To one who really hearkens to Spiritual Science in the right way there is nothing it has to give which does not either, on the one hand, uplift us, or on the other, allow us to see into the abuses of existence in order that we may there find our way aright. The student who understands Spiritual Science correctly always follows what it says with the appropriate feelings. Spiritual Science when accepted will transform his soul, even while in the physical world, simply through the ideas that live in him and through his acquiring the habits of thought and feeling which we have just mentioned as being necessary. I have often said that the earnest study of Spiritual Science is one of the best and most deeply-penetrating of all exercises.

Something remarkable gradually appears in one who takes up Spiritual Science. A person who performs exercises—possibly he does not do it in order to become a spiritual investigator himself, but only tries earnestly to understand Spiritual Science—such a person may perhaps not be able for a very long time to think of seeing clairvoyantly for himself. He will be able to do it sometime; though this may perhaps be a far-off ideal. But if he really allows Spiritual Science to act upon his soul in the manner we have indicated, he will find that the instincts of life, the more unconscious impulses of life change. His soul really becomes different. No one can take up Spiritual Science without it influencing the instinctive life of the soul. It makes the soul different, it gives it different sympathies and antipathies, it fills it with a sort of light, so that it feels more certain than it did formerly. This may be noticed in every realm of life; in every realm of life Spiritual Science expresses itself in this way. For example, a person may be unskilled; but if he takes up Spiritual Science he will see that without doing anything else than filling himself with Spiritual Science, he will become more apt and capable, even to the manner in which he uses his hands. Do not say: ‘I know some very unskilled people who follow Spiritual Science; and they are still very unskilled!’ Try to reflect to what extent these have not yet really permeated themselves inwardly with Spiritual Science according to the necessities of karma. A person may be a painter and exercise the art of painting to a certain degree; if he takes up Spiritual Science he will find that what we have just mentioned will flow instinctively into the actions he performs. He will mix his colours more easily; the ideas he wants will come more quickly. Or suppose he is a teacher, and wishes to take up some science. Many who are in this position will know how much trouble it often costs to gather together the literature required to clear up some question or other. If he takes up Spiritual Science, he will not go as before to a library and take down fifty books that are of no use, but he will immediately lay his hands on the right one. Spiritual Science really enters into one's life; it makes the instincts different; it gives us the impulse to do the right thing.

Of course what I shall now say must always be thought of in conjunction with human karma. It must always be kept in mind that man is subject to the law of karma under all circumstances. But taking into consideration the law of karma, the following is still the case. Let us suppose that a certain kind of illness attacks someone who has taken up Spiritual Science in the way described and it is in his karma that he may be cured. Naturally, it may be in his karma that the disease cannot be cured; but, when considering an illness, karma never under any circumstance says that it must run a certain course in a fatalistic sense, it can be cured or it cannot be cured. Now, anyone who has earnestly taken up Spiritual Science acquires an instinctive feeling which helps him to oppose the illness and its weakening effect with the proper remedy. That which in the ordinary way is experienced as the result of the illness in the spiritual world works back into the soul, and, in so far as one is still in the physical body, it acts as instinct. One either succumbs to the illness or finds within oneself the way to the forces of healing. When the clairvoyant consciousness finds the right remedy for an illness, it happens in the following way: such a clairvoyant is able to call up before him the picture of the illness. Let us suppose that he has the picture before him of the illness which approaches a person in such or such a way and has a weakening effect on him. Owing to his clairvoyant consciousness there appears to him the counterpart of the illness, namely, the corresponding feeling of health, and the strengthening which springs from this feeling. That which can now happen to man in the spiritual world as the corresponding cure for that from which he is suffering in the physical world, is perceived by the clairvoyant. Through this the clairvoyant is enabled to advise the man for his good. Indeed, one need not even be a fully developed clairvoyant, but this may appear to one instinctively from seeing the picture of the illness. But the cause of that which to clairvoyant consciousness appears as compensation in the spiritual world, belongs to the picture of the illness as much as the swing of a pendulum to one side belongs to the swing to the other side.

From this example you will see how the physical plane is related to the spiritual world and how fruitful for the guidance of our life here the knowledge of the spiritual world may be.

Let us go back once more to the first concrete fact we mentioned, namely: that just as nature surrounds us on the physical plane, so what is spiritual, wisdom-filled spirit, surrounds us in the spiritual world and is always there. Now, if you understand this thoroughly, an extremely important light is cast on what takes place in the spiritual world. In the physical world we may pass by objects and observe them in such a way that we may ask: What is the principle or nature of this object? What is the law of this Being, or this process? Or, on the other hand, we may pass stupidly by and ask nothing at all. We shall never learn anything intelligently on the physical plane if we are not impelled, as it were, by the object itself to ask questions, if these objects do not present problems which we recognise as such. By merely looking at objects and processes, we should never on the physical plane arrive at being a soul that guides itself. On the spiritual plane this is different. On the physical plane we put our questions to objects and processes, and we have to make efforts to investigate them in order to find the answer to our questions from the things themselves. On the spiritual plane things and Beings surround us spiritually and they question us, not we them. They are there and we stand before them and are continually being questioned by them. We must now have the power to draw from the infinite ocean of wisdom the answer to these questions. We have not to seek the answers in the objects and processes, but in ourselves; for the objects question us; all around us are objects questioning us.

At this point the following comes under consideration. Let us suppose that we confront some process or some Being in the spiritual world; inevitably it asks us a question. We cannot approach it without its doing so. We stand there with our wisdom, but we are unable to develop sufficient will, sufficient feeling-will, or willing-feeling to give the answer from out this wisdom, although we know that the answer is within us. Our inner being is infinitely deep; all answers are within us—but we are unable really to give the answer. The consequence of this is that we rush past on the stream of time and fail to give the answer at the proper time, because we have not gained the capacity—perhaps through our previous evolution—we have not become mature enough to answer the question when the time comes for it to be answered. We have developed too slowly with respect to what we ought to answer; we can only give the answer later. But the opportunity does not recur; we have missed it. We have not made use of all our opportunities. Thus we pass by objects and events without answering them. We have experiences such as this continually in the spiritual world. Thus it may come about, that in our life between death and rebirth we stand before a Being which questions us. We have not developed ourselves sufficiently in our earthly life and the intervening spiritual life, to give the answer when we are asked. We have to pass on; we have to enter into our next incarnation. The consequence of this is that we must receive the impulse once more, in our next incarnation, through the good Gods, without being conscious of it, so that we shall not pass by the next time when the same question is asked. This is how things come to pass.

I have often mentioned that the further we go back in human evolution the more do we find that humanity did not then possess our present mentality, but had a kind of clairvoyance on the physical plane. Our present mental outlook developed from a dull, dreamy clairvoyance. The more primitive and elementary the stages of mental development of some races still are, the closer connection we find in their thought and feeling to this original clairvoyance. Although the primitive atavistic clairvoyance is becoming less and less frequent, we still find in unexplored regions of the earth people who have preserved something from former times, so that we still find echoes of the ancient days of clairvoyance. This clairvoyance reveals—although in a dim, dreamy form, because it is a seeing into the spiritual world—it reveals peculiarities which reappear in the developed clairvoyance; only in the latter case it is not dim and dreamy, but clear and distinct. Spiritual Science shows us that when a man of the present time goes through life between death and rebirth, he has progressively to answer the questioning Beings more and more at the proper time; for on his power to answer depends his true development, and his approach to the ideal of the Gods—the perfect man. As we have already said, in former times people had this experience in the domain of dreams and we have the remains of it in a great number of fairy-tales and sagas. These are gradually disappearing, but they run somewhat as follows. A certain person meets a spiritual Being. This Being repeatedly questions him and he has to answer. And he knows that he must give the answer by a certain time, when the clock strikes, or something of that sort. This ‘question motif’ in fairy-tales and sagas is very widespread and is a form of dreamlike clairvoyant consciousness which now reappears in the spiritual world, in the way have described. On the whole, the description of what takes place in the spiritual world provides in all cases a valuable clue to the understanding of myths, sagas, fairy-tales, etc., and enables us to place them where they belong. This is a point which shows that everywhere, even in the mental culture of the present day, evolution is standing, as it were, at the door of Spiritual Science.

It is very interesting, that a book such as the one by my friend Ludwig Laistner, The Riddle of the Sphinx, which in many respects is a good and well-intentioned book, is unsatisfactory, because in order to be satisfactory, the ‘question motif’, with which Ludwig Laistner specially deals, would have had to be treated from the basis of occult knowledge; the author would have had to know something about the truths of occult science which enter here.

Bearing these examples in mind, we see that the conditions in the spiritual world depend upon something quite definite. In the spiritual world it is not a case of gathering knowledge as we do here; it is even a case of diminished knowledge and changing the force of knowledge into life-force. One cannot be an investigator in the spiritual world in the same sense as one can in the physical world; that would be an absurdity, for there a person is able to know everything, it is all round about him. The question is whether he is able to develop his will and his feeling, in contradistinction to his knowledge, whether in individual cases he is able to bring forth from the treasure of his will sufficient power to make use of his wisdom; otherwise he is stifled by or drowned in it. Whereas in the physical world wisdom depends on thinking, in the spiritual world it depends upon the adequate development of the will, the feeling-will, the will which brings forth reality out of wisdom, which becomes a kind of creative power. There we have Spirit as here we have Nature, and our task is to lead Spirit to Nature. A beautiful statement is contained in the theosophical literature of the first half of the nineteenth century, a statement made by Oetinger, who lived at Murrhardt, in Wurtemburg, and who was so far advanced in his own spiritual development that at certain times he was able quite consciously to help spiritual beings, that is, souls who were not on the physical plane. He made the remarkable statement which is very beautiful and very true: ‘Nature and the form of nature is the aim of spiritual creative power.’ What I have just brought down to you from the spiritual world is contained in this sentence. In the spiritual world creative power strives to give reality to that which at first heaves and surges in wisdom. Here, we bring forth wisdom from the physical reality; there we do the reverse. Our task there is to produce realities from wisdom, to carry out in living realities the wisdom we find there. The goal of the Gods is reality in form.

Thus we see that it depends upon will permeated with feeling, or feeling-filled-will being changed into creative force; this we must employ in the spiritual world in the same way as here in the physical world we have to employ great mental efforts in order to arrive at wisdom.

Now, in order that this should be possible, it is very important that we should develop our feeling and thinking in the right way, that we should prepare ourselves here on the physical plane in a manner which is right for the present cycle of evolution; for all that takes place in the spiritual world between death and rebirth is the result of what takes place in the physical world between birth and death. It is indeed true, that conditions are so different in the spiritual world that we have to acquire entirely fresh conceptions and ideas if we wish to understand them, but all the same the two are connected like cause and effect. We only understand the connection between what is spiritual and what is physical, when we recognise it really as the connection of cause and effect. We have to prepare ourselves while in the physical world and we might therefore now consider the question: How, at the present age, can we prepare ourselves in the right way, so that—whether we enter the spiritual world through initiation or through death—we shall really possess the spiritual power necessary to draw what we have need of from the wisdom that is there—so that we may bring forth realities from this surging flowing wisdom. Whence comes such power? It is important that these questions should be answered in a manner adapted to our present age. In the age when mankind thought in such a way, that the origin of what I have called the ‘Saga motiv’ resulted, the case was different; but from whence comes this soul-force in the present age?

In order that we arrive at the answer to this, may I bring forward the following?

We can study the various philosophies and inquire as to how philosophers arrive at the idea of God—there are, of course, philosophers who have sufficient spiritual depth to be convinced from the existence of the world that we may speak of a Divine Being who pervades it. In the nineteenth century we need only take Lotze, who tried to produce in his religious philosophy something that was in harmony with the rest of his philosophy. Others too were sufficiently profound to have with all their philosophy a sort of religious philosophy also. We find one peculiarity in all these philosophers, a very definite peculiarity. They think to reach Divinity with ideas gathered from the physical plane; they reflect, they investigate in a philosophical manner, and come to the conclusion—as is the case with Lotze—that the phenomena and beings of the world are held together by a divine First Cause which pervades all and brings all into a certain harmony. But when we go more minutely into the ideas of these religious philosophers, we find that they always have one peculiarity. They arrive at a Divine Being who pervades all; and when we consider this Divine Being more closely, this God of the philosophers, we find that it is approximately the God called in the Hebrew, or rather, the Christian religion ‘God the Father’. Thus far do the philosophers go; they observe Nature and are profound enough not to deny everything Divine in an empty-headed, materialistic way; they can arrive at Divinity, but it is God the Father.

One can demonstrate most exactly, after studying these philosophers, that mere philosophy, as thinking philosophy, can lead nowhere but to a monotheistic Father-God.

If in the case of individual philosophers, such as Hegel and others, Christ is mentioned; it does not spring from philosophy—this can be proved—it comes from positive religion. These people have known that positive religion possesses the Christ and therefore they can speak of Him. The difference is, that the Father-God can be found through philosophy, but Christ cannot be found by any philosophy, by any method of thought. That is quite impossible.

That is a statement which I suggest you should weigh well and consider; if rightly understood it leads us far into the most important probings and strivings of the human soul. It is connected with something which is expressed in the Christian religion in a very beautiful, symbolic and pictorial manner; namely, that the relation of this other God, Christ, to the Father-God is understood as the relation of the Son to the Father. That is a very significant fact, although it is only a symbol. It is interesting to notice that Lotze, for example, cannot make anything out of it. ‘One cannot take this symbol literally, that is obvious,’ says Lotze. He means that one God cannot be the son of another. But there is something very striking in this symbol. Between father and son the relationship is something like that between cause and effect; for in a certain way one may see the father is the cause of the son. The son would not exist if the father were not there—like cause and effect. But we must take into account one peculiar thing, namely, that a man who eventually may have a son, may also have the possibility of not having a son, he may be childless. He would still be the same man. The cause is the man A, the effect is the man B, the son; but the effect need not come about, the effect is a free act, and follows as a free act from the cause. For this reason, when we study a cause considering it in connection with its effect, we must not merely inquire into the nature of the cause, for by this we have done nothing at all; but we must inquire whether the cause also really causes; that is the important question. Now a characteristic of all philosophy is that it follows a line of thought, it develops one thought out of another; it seeks for what follows in that which has gone before. Philosophers are justified in doing this; but in this way we never arrive at the connection which comes about when we call to mind the fact that the cause need not cause at all. The cause remains the same in its own nature whether it causes or not. That changes nothing in the nature of the cause. And this important fact is presented to us in the symbol of God the Father and God the Son: this important fact, that the Christ is added to the Father-God, as a free creation, as a creation which does not follow in due course, but which emerges as a free act alongside the previous creation and which also had the possibility not to be; the Christ is therefore not given to the world because the Father had to give the Son to the world, but the Son is given to the world as a free act, through grace, through freedom, through love, which when it creates, gives freely. For this reason we can never arrive at God the Son, the Christ, through the same kind of truth by which the philosophers arrive at God the Father. In order to arrive at Christ it is necessary to add the truth of faith to the philosophical truth, or—as the age of faith is declining more and more—to add the other truth which is obtained through clairvoyant investigation, which likewise only develops in the human soul as a free act.

Thus from the ordered processes of nature it may be demonstrated that there is a God; but it can never be proved by external means from the chain of causes and effects that there is a Christ. Christ exists and can pass by human souls if they do not feel in themselves the power to say: That is Christ! An active up-rousing of the impulse for truth is required in order to recognise Christ in that which was there as Christ. We can arrive at the other truths which lie in the realm of the Father-God, if we merely devote ourselves to thought and follow it consecutively; for to be a materialist means at the same time to be illogical. Religious philosophy according to Lotze, and religious philosophy in general, has its origin in the fact that through thought we can rise to this Divinity of religious philosophy. But never can we be led to recognise Christ merely through philosophy; this must be our own free act. In this case only two things are possible; we either follow faith to its ultimate conclusions, or we make a beginning with the investigation of the spiritual world, Spiritual Science. We follow faith to its ultimate conclusion when we say with the Russian philosopher Solovioff: ‘With regard to all the philosophical truths man gains about the world, to which his logic forces him, he does not stand related as to a free truth. The higher truth is that to which we are not forced, which is our free act, the highest truth won by faith.’ Solovioff reaches his highest point when he says: ‘The higher truth, that which recognises Christ, is the truth which works as a free act, which is not forced.’ To the spiritual investigator and to those who understand Spiritual Science, knowledge comes; but this is an active knowledge which rises from thought to Meditation, Inspiration and Intuition, which becomes inwardly creative, which, when creative, participates in spiritual worlds and thereby becomes similar to what we have to develop when we enter into the spiritual world, whether we do so through initiation or through death.

The wisdom which we acquire with such difficulty on earth, surrounds us in all its fullness and wealth in the spiritual world—just as nature surrounds us here on the physical plane.

The important thing in the spiritual world is that we should have the impulse, the power, to make something out of this wisdom, to produce from it reality. To create freely through wisdom, to bring about something spiritual as fact, must become a living impulse in us. This impulse can only be ours if we find the right relationship to Christ. Christ is not a Being who can be proved by external brain-bound logic, but who proves Himself, who realises Himself in us as we acquire spiritual knowledge. Just as Spiritual Science joins up with other science as a free act, so knowledge about Christ is added to us as soon as we approach the world into which we enter through spiritual investigation, or through death. If in our present age we seek to enter the spiritual world aright, that is to say, if we wish to die to the physical world, our attitude to the world must be that attitude which is only gained when we relate ourselves to Christ in the right way. Through the observation of nature we can attain to a God who is like ‘God the Father’ of the Christian religion, Him we find through the observation of what is around us when we live in the physical body; but to understand Christ aright, apart from tradition and revelation, from pure knowledge alone, is only possible through Spiritual Science. It leads into the realm which man enters by dying—whether it be that dying which is a symbolical dying, the going forth from the physical body in order to know oneself in the soul outside the body, or the other dying, the passing through the portal of death. We provide ourselves with the right impulses to pass through the portal of death, when we find the true relationship to Christ. The moment when death takes place, whether it comes about through Spiritual Science or whether we actually go through the portal of death, the moment it comes to dying, to leaving the physical body, the important thing in the present cycle of time is that we should confront in the right way the Being Who has come into the world, in order that we may find connection with Him. God the Father we can find during life; we find the Christ when we understand the entering into the Spirit, when we understand dying in the right way.

IN CHRISTO MORIMUR
We die in Christ.

I have now to speak once more of the events between death and rebirth, making use of the ideas we have acquired in the previous lectures. As we can only deal briefly with this wide subject, a great deal can be but indicated and much else which perhaps does not follow from this pictorial presentation will have to be worked out later; but that which at present you may find incomplete will be made clear in the further course of our studies in Spiritual Science.

When a person passes the portal of death, he lays aside his physical body. This is consigned to the elements of the earth. In other words we may say of the physical body, that it has withdrawn from the forces and laws proceeding from the true man which permeate it between birth and death and which are different from the mere chemical and physical laws to which, as physical body, it succumbs after death. From the standpoint of the physical plane, a person has naturally the idea that he has left on the physical plane that part of his being which belongs to that plane. What belongs to the physical plane is consigned to the physical plane. For the comprehension of man himself and also for any comprehension of the spiritual world, we have naturally to consider the point of view taken by the dead person when he has passed through the portal of death. To him the leaving of the physical body means an inner process, a soul-process. To those who are left behind, what happens to the physical body after death is an external process, and the inner being of the person who has died, his human soul nature, can no longer express itself in the mortal residue; but to the man himself who has passed through the portal of death, something is connected with this leaving of the body. To him it means an inner experience of the soul; he feels: Thou hast come forth out of thy physical body and art leaving it behind.

From the standpoint of the physical plane, it is extremely difficult to give an accurate description of what here takes place within the soul; for it is an inner process of far reaching importance and immense significance. It is an inner process which lasts but a brief space of time, but it is of universal importance to the whole of human life. Now if the ideas connected with what then takes place in the soul were to be described—these ideas which of course cannot be touched upon at present in a public lecture because they would astonish the public too much, though perhaps the time will also come for this—if we were to describe the external process of ideas (now of course the spiritually external) with which the path of life running between death and rebirth commences, we might say that the person who has passed the portal of death has the feeling: Thou art now in an entirely different relationship to the world from that in which thou wast before; thy former relationship to the world is radically reversed. If we wished to describe the ideas which are then experienced in the soul, we should have to say that up to his death a person has lived on the earth. During this time he has been accustomed to stand on the solid, material earth, to see there the beings belonging to the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, to see the mountains, rivers, clouds, stars, sun and moon; and from his own standpoint and through the powers of his physical body he has become accustomed to conceive of all this as we do to-day. This he does although at the present day we know from the teaching of Copernicus that fundamentally what we see is an illusion. There above us is the blue vault of the heavens, like a bowl, there are the stars, over it pass the sun and moon. Man is within this bowl as it were, he is within this hollow globe, in the centre, on the earth, together with all that the earth reveals to his powers of perception.

We are not at present concerned with the fact that it is an illusion when through the limitation of our capacities, we picture to ourselves this blue circumference, but with the fact that we cannot do otherwise than see it; we see a blue globe as a firmament above us. Now when a person has passed the portal of death, the first idea he has to form in his soul is: ‘Thou art now outside, but as though sunk into a single star.’ At first he is unconscious of the starry world in which he is really outspread, at first he is only aware of what he has left, he is only aware that he has left the sphere of consciousness he possessed in the physical body, he has left all that he was able to see by means of the human capacities developed in his physical body. Something has really happened—but spiritually—similar to what would happen if a chick, which at first is within the egg-shell, were consciously to experience how it breaks through this and afterwards sees the broken egg-shell—the world which had previously surrounded it—from outside, instead of from inside. Naturally this idea, which passes through the human soul at this point is Maya; but it is a necessary Maya or illusion. As we have already said, that which previously gave our consciousness its content has shrunk together as if into a single star, only that from this star radiates what we might call ‘radiating cosmic wisdom.’

This radiating cosmic wisdom is what I dealt with in the last lecture and regarding which I said that we possess it in its fullness. It shines and glitters at first as if from a fiery star. It is now not blue, like the firmament, but fiery, shining, reddish—like a fiery star. And from it streams forth into space the plenitude of wisdom, which in inward motion first presents to us what might be called a memory-tableau of our last earthly life. All the events we have consciously experienced in our soul between birth and death now come before our soul, but in such a manner that we know: There thou seest all, because the star shining before thee is the background which, through its inner activity, is the cause of thy being able to see what is outspread before thee, as a memory tableau. That is expressed more from the standpoint of the imagination. From the standpoint of inwardness the experience is somewhat as follows: The one who has passed the portal of death is entirely filled with the thought: Thou hast left thy body; now in the spiritual world this body is nothing but will. Thy body is a star of will, a star whose substance is will; and this will glows with warmth, and into the expanses of the world into which thou hast now poured thyself, it rays back to thee thy own life between birth and death as a great tableau. To the circumstance of thy sojourn within this star thou owest the privilege that thou art able to draw and absorb from the world what thou hast drawn and absorbed from it while on the physical plane: for this star, this will-star, which now forms the background is the spiritual part of thy physical body, this will-star is the spirit which permeates and strengthens thy physical body. That which streams to thee as wisdom is the activity, the mobility of thy etheric body.

This period passes. The period during which we have the impression that our life is running its course like a memory-tableau really only lasts for some days. Our thoughts, which became our memories during life on earth, unfold once more before our souls in this memory-tableau. We can maintain this tableau as long as we have the power under normal conditions to keep awake in the physical body. It does not depend upon how long we once remained awake in life under abnormal conditions, it depends upon the power we have within us to keep ourselves awake. In one case it may be that a person can scarcely keep awake one night without tiredness overcoming him, in another case it may be that he can hold out longer without becoming tired; but the length of time he needs to finish with this memory-tableau depends upon the degree of this power. We also have the distinct inner consciousness that because this will-star is in the background, there is contained within the memory-tableau what we have gained in our last earthly life, there is contained in it that by which we have become more mature, what we have carried beyond death as a plus quantity as compared with what we had as a minus quantity when at birth we entered into earthly life. This, which we may describe as the fruit of the last life, we feel in such a way as if it would not remain as it appeared during the memory-tableau, but as if it withdrew, as if it went away into the future and disappeared in those future ages.

In this lecture I shall speak principally of the condition in the life between death and rebirth of those who have reached the normal length of life and have died under normal conditions. Exceptional cases will be dealt with in the next lecture.

Thus the fruit of our life, if we have gained such fruit, withdraws to a distance and we know within our soul:—This fruit exists somewhere, but we have been left behind by it. We have the consciousness that we have remained at an earlier period of time, the fruit of our life hurries forward, it arrives before us at a later period of time and we have to follow after it. We must grasp correctly what I have just said, this idea of the inward experience of the fruit of our life being in the universe; because it is this inward experience which forms the basis of our consciousness, the beginning of our consciousness after death.

Our consciousness must always be aroused by something. When we awake in the morning our consciousness is enkindled anew through our entering into the physical body and thereby confronting outer objects, through something affecting us from outside, while during sleep we are unconscious. In the state immediately after death, this consciousness is enkindled by our inward feeling and experience of the fruits of our last life, experience of what we have gained. These fruits exist, but outside us. Our consciousness is first enkindled after death through this feeling and experience of our inmost earthly nature being outside us. By this our consciousness is quickened. Then begins the period during which it is necessary for us to develop soul-forces which had really to remain undeveloped during our life on the physical plane, because they were used to organise the physical body and all appertaining to it—soul-forces which during physical life have to be changed into something else. These forces have to awaken gradually after death. Even in the days during which we experienced the memory-tableau we notice this awakening of soul-capacities. This happens when the memory-tableau gradually fades away and grows dim, because it is during these days that we actually develop the forces lying at the foundation of the faculty of remembrance, but not acting consciously during physical life. The reason these forces do not act consciously during physical life is because during this physical life we have to transform them in order to be able to form memories. The last great memory which we have after death in the form of the tableau must first fade away, must gradually grow dim. Then out of the darkness develops that which we could not consciously possess before death; for if we had had it consciously before death we could never have formed the forces of memory. The forces which now develop in the soul during the fading of the remembrance of the tableau of life were, during life, transformed into the power by which we remember: they now emerge, because the power to remember earthly thoughts in the ordinary way is overcome and this spiritually transformed memory-force is awakened within us as the first spiritual soul-force which comes forth from the human soul after death, just as the soul-forces come forth in a growing child in the first weeks of its life. As this soul-force grows it is revealed to us that behind our thoughts, which while we were on the physical plane were but shadows, something lives; there is life and movement in the world of thought. We become aware that the thought pictures in our physical body were but a shadow and that in them there really lives and expands a vast number of elemental beings. Our memories grow dim and in their place we see emerge a vast number of elemental beings out of the universal cosmos of wisdom.

You might ask, ‘Is it not a great loss when after death the power of memory is overcome and we have something else in its place?’ We do not miss it, because we then have a very good substitute for it. Instead of remembering our thoughts as we do in life, we notice after death that these thoughts, which we had in life as memory-thoughts, only seem to be memories. This treasure of memory which is ours during life becomes something much more than merely a treasure of memory. When we are out of our physical body, we see all this treasure of memory as a living presence; it exists. Every thought is alive, is a living being. Now we know: During physical life thou didst think, thy thoughts appeared to thee; but while thou wast under the delusion that thou wast forming thoughts, thou wast producing nothing but elemental beings. That is the new thing thou hast added to the whole cosmos. Something new exists, to which thou gavest birth in the spirit; that which thy thoughts really were now stands before thee. We now first learn by direct vision what elemental beings are, because this is the first time we come to know the elemental beings we have ourselves produced. This memory-tableau is the very important impression we receive in the first period after death; but this begins to live, really to live, and as it begins to live we perceive it as nothing but elemental beings. It now shows its true face, as it were and its disappearance merely signifies its change into something different. If, for example, we died at the age of sixty or eighty, we do not need the power of memory to remember a thought we had, say, at the age of twenty, because it is there as a living elemental being, it has waited and we do not need to remember it; then if we died, for example, at the age of forty the thought would only be twenty years old and we should see it clearly. These elemental beings themselves tell us how long it is since they were formed. Time becomes space: it stands before us, because the living beings reveal their own time-signature. Under these conditions time becomes the immediate present.

From these, our own elemental beings, which surrounded us during life and which we see at death, we learn the nature of the elemental world and thereby prepare ourselves gradually to understand the elemental beings in the outer world not produced by us, but existing apart from us in the spiritual cosmos. Through our own elemental creations we learn to know the others. Think how very different this life between death and rebirth really is from our earthly life. The main thing is that after physical birth we are not aware of ourselves. What we experience as a baby, those around us experience with us; we are born, and others, our parents, look upon this which has been born. Neither are we aware of ourselves at first after death, but we see as an outer world that to which we have given birth. We ourselves look upon that which is outside, that to which we have given birth at the moment of death. When at our physical birth we enter into existence, we have an incomprehensible world before us, and to those around us we are indeed a being who only sprawls and cries and laughs; but after death, after our birth into the spiritual world—which to the physical world is death—we enter at once into an environment to which we ourselves have given birth, which we have ourselves organised, for we have ourselves given birth to it. There, we have given birth to a world, whereas, when we are born physically, this world gives birth to us. Such are the conditions with respect to thought and also to that which springs from thought as our store of memory.

It is different as regards what belongs to our feeling and our will. In the first lecture I mentioned that all that belongs to the spheres of our feeling and our will is not yet born in us, that in a certain respect will and feeling are something which is not fully born. This can be seen clearly after death; for will and feeling, as they pervade the physical body, still exist after death. So that after a time, after the will-star has withdrawn with the fruits of our last earthly life, we live in an elemental world which forms our environment to which we ourselves give the fundamental tone through our transformed memories. We live in such a manner in this world, which really is ourselves, in the sense I have just explained, that we know: Thy feeling and thy will are still in thee. They have still a sort of remembrance, a sort of connection with thy last earthly life. This condition lasts for decades. When we are in earthly life between birth and death, we enjoy and suffer, we live in our passions and we develop impulses of the will through having the feeling and willing soul in our body; but it is never the case that all the forces contained in feeling and will are really able to find an outlet through the body. Even though we may die in very old age, we still could have enjoyed more, suffered more, we still could have developed more impulses of the will. All the possibilities of feeling and will that yet remain in the soul must, however, be overcome. As long as these are not fully overcome we still have a connection of desire with our last earthly life. We look back, as it were, at this last earthly life. It is, as I have often expressed by a trivial word, a sort of weaning from the connection with the physical earthly life. Anyone who is but to a slight degree a true spiritual investigator soon penetrates into the nature of the force which we have now to overcome, and this overcoming takes decades to accomplish: but it is revealed comparatively easily to spiritual investigation.

Each day when we fall asleep and when we experience the interval between sleeping and waking, we are in our soul and spiritual nature outside our body. We return, because in our soul and spirit nature we have the impulse to return, because we really have a desire for our body. We absolutely long for our body. And one who can consciously experience awaking, knows: you want to awaken and you must will to waken. In the spirit and soul-nature there is indeed a force of attraction to the body. This must gradually decline, it must be entirely overcome and this takes decades to accomplish. This is the period in which we gradually overcome our connection with our last earthly life and this is why, in the period which is occupied in the manner I have just described, we really have to experience in a reversed direction everything that took place in our earthly life.

Now that the previous lectures have been given, I am in a position to describe various conditions more minutely than before, when only a general outline could be given; for before this could be done, it was necessary that certain ideas should first be brought forward.

Let us suppose that we have passed the portal of death and that we have left someone behind on the earth. We are now in the period when we have gained the power of beholding elemental beings and of having the inward feeling that the fruits of our earthly life have withdrawn; but that we are still connected with this last earthly life. Let us suppose, that when we have passed the portal of death we have left behind one whom we have loved very much. Now, when after death we have become accustomed to our elemental creations, we gradually attain to seeing the elemental beings of others; it is possible for us now to see the thoughts of others as elemental beings. We see the thoughts that live in the soul of the person we have left behind, for they are expressed in living elementals which appear before our soul as mighty Imaginations. In this way we can now have a much more intimate connection with the inner life of this person than we had with him in the physical world; for while we ourselves were in the physical body we could not indeed see the thoughts of the other, whereas now we can. But we have need of the feeling-memory—please note the word—the feeling-memory, the connection of feeling with our own last earthly life. We must feel, just as we felt in the body, and this feeling must echo in us. Then, when the thoughts of the other appear to us, the whole condition, which otherwise would only be as a picture, receives life. Thus, by the route of our feeling, we gain a living connection with our friend: it is really so with everyone.

You see, it is a development of a condition which may be described thus: There is a period during which we still have to draw from our last earthly life the forces enabling us to enter into living relationship with the surrounding spiritual world; we have still to be connected with this earthly life. We love the souls we have left behind, the contents of whose souls appear to us as thoughts, as elemental beings. But we love them because we ourselves are still living in the love we developed for them during our earthly life. The expression is not a happy one, but some of you will understand me when I say that earth-life—not the thought-life but the earth-life whose soul-contents are filled with feeling and permeated with the impulse of will—this earth-life, with which we are still connected, becomes like a sort of electric switch connecting our own individuality with what goes on around us spiritually; we perceive everything in a roundabout way through our last earthly life, but we only perceive what appertains to us in the spiritual world, through the feeling and will that were ours in our last earthly life. It is now really the case that we feel ourselves living on further into time, as a sort of comet of time. Our earthly life is still there like the kernel of the comet, but the kernel sends out a sort of tail into the near future through which we live. We are still connected with our earthly life in so far as this is filled with feeling and will, and from this experience something must be born within our soul as I have described, something that is not directly feeling and will. The soul-powers we develop here in the physical world, which include the power of feeling as we have it here in the physical world and the power of the will as we have it here in the physical world, these soul-powers we possess in this form, because we are living in the physical body. When the soul no longer lives in the physical body, it has to develop other qualities which only slumber during physical life. Because the echoes of feeling and will reverberate in it for years, the soul has to mature something from them which it can also use for the spiritual world in this respect, namely a force which I might describe as something like a feeling-desire or a desiring-feeling. In respect of our feeling and our will, we know that these dwell within our soul; but after death we do not, on the whole, possess such feeling and desire, they must gradually fade and die down, and they do this after some years.

But during this dying down and fading away, something has to develop from feeling and will which can be ours after death. Our thoughts live outside us as elemental beings; of inward feeling and will we should have nothing in this spiritual world which we ourselves are, and which is there, outside us. We have gradually to develop a will—and this we really do—which streams forth from us, which pours forth from us, as it were, and undulates and moves to where our living thoughts are. These it penetrates, because then upon the waves of will floats the feeling which in physical life is within us and not outside. Feeling then returns to us floating on the waves of will. There, outside surges and billows the ocean of our will and upon this swims our feeling. When the will strikes against an elemental thought-being, the contact produces an up-glimmering of feeling and we perceive this ‘ricochet’ of our will as an absolute reality of the spiritual world. Let us suppose there is an elemental being in the outer spiritual world. When we have gradually worked out of the condition we must first pass through, our will going forth from us breaks against this elemental being. When it strikes against the elemental being it is thrown back. It does not now return as will, but as feeling, which floats back to us on the waves of will. Our own being which is poured out into the cosmos lives as feeling which comes back to us on the waves of will. The elemental beings thereby become real to us and we gradually perceive that which exists outside us as the outer spiritual world.

Still another soul-force has to come forth from us, which slumbers in a much deeper layer of the soul than the feeling-will or the willing-feeling. It is creative soul-force, which is like an inner soul-light that must shine forth over the spiritual world, in order that we may not only see the living, active, objective thought-beings floating back to us on the waves of feeling in the ocean of our will, but that we may also illumine this spiritual world with spiritual light. Creative, spiritual illuminating power must go forth from our soul into the spiritual world. This awakens gradually.

You see, that while living in physical life we have at least differentiated within us the pair of brothers—feeling and will, from feeling-will or willing-feeling: we possess these as a duality whereas when we have passed the portal of death they are unity. The creative soul-force which we radiate as soul-light into spiritual space (if I may use the word ‘space’ here, for in reality it is not space, but we have to try to make these conditions comprehensible by expressing them pictorially), this soul-light slumbers so deep down within us because it is connected with something regarding which we neither may nor can know anything during life. That which is liberated as light and which then illumines and brightens the spiritual world slumbers very deep down within us during our life on the physical plane. What then rays forth from us, has to be transformed during our physical life and used in such a way that our body shall really live and that consciousness shall dwell in it. Entirely below the threshold of consciousness works this spiritual illuminating power in our physical body, as the power which organises life and consciousness. We dare not bring it into our earthly consciousness, for we should then rob our physical body of the power which has to organise it. But when we have no body to take care of, it becomes spiritual illuminating power, and streams through, shines and glitters through everything: these words signify actual realities.

Thus we gradually work our way onwards to where we become at home in the spiritual world and experience it as a reality, just as here we experience the physical world as a reality. We gradually arrive at really having the souls of those who have passed the portal of death as our companions in the spiritual world, in so far as these really live in the spiritual world. We then live among souls, just as here in the physical body we live among bodies. As we enter more and more into the true spirit of Spiritual Science, the assertion that after death we do not meet again all those with whom we have lived here, would be, to one who goes more deeply into the matter, as foolish as if someone were to say, with respect to the physical plane, that when we enter upon the earth at birth we find no human beings there. Human beings are all about us.—To one who knows spiritual life it is exactly the same as if someone were to say: the child comes into the physical world, but it sees no one there. That, obviously, is nonsense. In the same way it is nonsense when people say: when we enter into the spiritual world we do not find again all the souls with whom we have been associated, neither do we find the Beings belonging to the higher Hierarchies, whom we recognise in their order, as here upon the earth we recognise minerals, plants and animals! But there is this difference, here in the physical world we know that when we see and hear objects and beings, the possibility for doing so comes through our senses, from the outer world. In the spiritual world we know that this possibility comes from ourselves, because what we may call the soul-light streams forth from our souls illuminating everything about us.

Thus do we live in the period which may be called the first half of our life between death and rebirth. While we are living in this period we go through the two conditions I have already described:—one, a condition lasting for years, in which, through the illuminating power proceeding from our soul, we are connected with the spiritual world and are thus enabled to perceive spirits and souls about us. This then grows dim and we have the feeling: thou canst develop thy soul-illuminating power, thy soul-light less and less, thou art obliged to let it become dimmer and darker in a spiritual sense. Thereby thou canst see spiritual beings less and less. It becomes increasingly the case that we enter alternating periods in which we have a feeling which we may express thus: Beings surround thee on all sides but thou art becoming more and more solitary, thou art aware only of the contents of thine own soul and these contents grow richer to the same extent that thou ceasest to be able to illuminate the beings without.—There are periods of spiritual companionship, and again, periods of spiritual solitude during which we live over again in our soul, what we experienced in the periods of spiritual companionship. These conditions alternate. Such is our life in the spiritual world: spiritual companionship, and again spiritual solitude. In periods of spiritual solitude we know: what thou didst experience in the spiritual world around thee was indeed there, thou knewest about all that; but now there remains only the echo of it within thee. One might say, that what we experience in the periods of spiritual solitude, are memories; but these words do not express it exactly. I must therefore try to describe it to you from another aspect. It is not as if in the period of spiritual darkness, when one has no companions, one were to remember what one had previously experienced in the spiritual world, but as if one had to produce this afresh every moment: it is a continual inward creation. One is inwardly aware: While there, outside thee the outer world exists; thou must remain alone and create and create. What thou createst is the world which surges around thee beyond the shores of thine own being.

As we thus live on further during the first half of our life between death and rebirth and approach the middle of the period between death and rebirth, we feel the solitary life grow richer and richer and at the same time the vision of our spiritual environment becomes dimmer and more restricted. This continues until we arrive at the middle of the period between death and rebirth, which in my last Mystery Drama, The Soul's Awakening, I have endeavoured to describe as the Midnight of the World. That is the period when we have the strongest inward life, but we no longer have within us the creative soul-force enabling us to illumine our spiritual environment. Here, one might say, infinite worlds fill us inwardly, spiritually, but we are unable to know anything about any other being except our own. That is the central point in our experience between death and rebirth, it is the Midnight of the World.

Now the time begins when there develops within us the longing for a positive creative power; for although we have an infinite inner life, there awakens within us the longing to have an outer world again. And so different are the conditions of the spiritual world from those of the physical world, that whereas in the physical world longing is the most passive force (when there is something for which we long, this something is what determines us), the reverse is the case in the spiritual world. There, longing is a creative force; it transforms itself into something which, as a new kind of soul-light, is able to give us an outer world, an outer world which is yet an inner world, inasmuch as it reveals to us a vision of our previous earthly incarnations. These now lie outspread before us, illumined by the light that is born of our longing. In the spiritual cosmos there is a power which comes from longing, which can illumine this backward survey and enable us to experience ourselves.

But to this end one thing is necessary in our present age. I have said that during the whole of the first half of our life between death and rebirth we alternate between inner life and outer life, between solitude and spiritual companionship. At first the conditions in the spiritual world are such, that each time we return to our solitude in the spiritual world, to our inner activity, we call up before our soul again and again what we have experienced in the outer world. Thereby a consciousness is aroused which expands over the whole of the spiritual world; with the swing of the pendulum this again contracts during the period of solitude.

There is one thing, however, which exists there and which we must retain, no matter whether we expand into the great spiritual world, or withdraw into ourselves. Before the Mystery of Golgotha took place, it was possible, through the forces connecting man with primeval times, to preserve a connection with that which gave him the feeling of ‘I’. It was possible not to lose this connection, for he could preserve a clear remembrance of one thing in the previous earthly life, namely, that in this life on the earth he had lived as an ‘I’; and this remembrance continued both through the periods of solitude and of companionship. Before the Mystery of Golgotha the forces of inheritance took care of this. Now, it can only be accomplished through the fact that the soul-content, which we may have through Christ having entered into the earth aura, remains connected with that which we have released from us as the treasure we have brought from the earth, which we perceived withdraw immediately after leaving the physical body. This is the permeation with the Christ-substance, which after death gives us the power to maintain the remembrance of our ‘I’ up to the time of the world-midnight, in spite of all expansion and in spite of all the contraction into solitude. Thus far does the impulse proceeding from the power of Christ extend, that through it we do not lose ourselves. Then from our longing must spring a new spiritual power, a power that only exists in spiritual life and by which, through our longing a new light may be kindled.

In the physical world there is Nature and the Divinity which pervades Nature, from which we are born into the physical world. There is the Christ-impulse which is present in the earth's aura, that is, in the aura of physical nature. But the power which draws near to us in the Midnight of the World, through which our longing is enabled to illumine the whole of our past, this power exists only in the spiritual world where nobody can live. When the Christ-impulse has brought us as far as to the Midnight of the World, and when the Midnight of the World is experienced by the soul in spiritual loneliness, because the soul-light cannot yet stream forth from us, when world-darkness has come upon us, when Christ has led us thus far, then in the Midnight of the World there emerges something spiritual from our desire, creating a new world-light which illuminates our being and by means of which we enter anew into worldly existence. We learn to know the Spirit of the spiritual world which awakens us, because out of the Midnight of the World a new light shines, the light which illuminates the whole of our human past.

In Christ we have died; through the Spirit, through the bodiless Spirit for which the technical expression Holy Ghost is used, i.e., the Spirit that lives without a body—(for this is meant by the word Holy, namely, a spirit without the weakness of one that lives in the body)—through this Spirit we are reawakened at the Midnight of the World. At the World-Midnight we are awakened by the Holy Ghost:

PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS

In this, my last lecture, I should like to continue from where we left off yesterday. We were speaking of what I described as the great ‘Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence between death and rebirth’, that Midnight Hour when our human inner experience is most intense and when that which we may call spiritual companionship, our connection with the outer spiritual world, has reached its lowest ebb, so that in a certain respect during this Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence spiritual darkness surrounds us. We said also that the longing for the outer world again becomes active within us, that this longing arises through the Spirit which works in spiritual worlds, and that it enkindles a new soul-light in us, so that it becomes possible for us to see an external world of a particular kind. The external world we then see is our own past, which has run its course through previous incarnations, and the intervening periods between deaths and re-births: this we then survey as an outer world, through looking back upon what we have received from, and enjoyed in worldly existence, and upon that for which we are indebted to the world. When we thus survey our previous experiences, two things come before us with particular intensity. We have enjoyed certain things and this is shown us by spiritual vision; we have had certain joys and sorrows in life. We can survey these joys and sorrows, but we see what we have experienced in such a way that it is its spiritual value which appears to us; we see it with respect to what it has made of us.

Let us take a concrete example. We look back upon some enjoyment, some satisfaction we have had at some time in our past life. We then feel: this is not something that is past; the time when we enjoyed it does indeed lie behind us, but it is not something that is absolutely past. It is something which continues its activity into all future time and it continues it in such a manner that it still awaits what we are going to make out of it. When we have experienced some enjoyment, some satisfaction, in our soul we feel somewhat as follows when we survey it: ‘This must become a force within thee, a force in thy soul, and thou canst allow this force to act within thee in two ways. In this spiritual existence in which thou art after the Midnight of the World two things are possible; the spiritual world simply gives thee the power to bring about one of these possibilities; thou canst change this past enjoyment, this past inward satisfaction into a capacity, so that through the past enjoyment thou art able to develop a certain power in thy soul, whereby thou canst accomplish something in the world, small or great, that is of value to the world. That is one thing. The other we may express to ourselves thus: ‘I have had the enjoyment, I shall be satisfied with it, I shall take it into my soul and refresh myself through this past enjoyment.’ When we do this with much of what we have enjoyed and has given us pleasure, we produce a power within us through which we gradually degenerate and suffocate spiritually. This is one of the most important things we can learn in the spiritual world, that through enjoyment, through that which has given us pleasure, we have also become debtors to the world. There rises before our spiritual eyes the prospect of our suffocating in the after-effects of these past satisfactions and enjoyments, if we do not decide at the right time to create capacities from them which can produce something of value to life. From this you see once more, spiritual events interact with what takes place on the physical plane.

When a person fills himself more and more with the knowledge of Spiritual Science as outlined in the lecture before the last, this will pass into the instinctive life of his soul and in respect to the pleasures he has upon the physical plane will develop a feeling, like the stimulus of an inner conscience, that he must not give himself up to certain enjoyment, pleasure or joy for its own sake, but he must fill this joy with a feeling of thankfulness to the universe, to the spiritual powers of the universe; for he will know that through every pleasure, through every enjoyment he becomes a debtor to the universe. We arrive most easily and most certainly at the right attitude, in the transformation of those enjoyments and pleasures which are of a spiritual nature. Enjoyments and pleasures which can only be satisfied through the body, or through having a body on the physical plane, confront us in this period between death and rebirth as something that must be transformed if we do not wish to be slowly suffocated in them. We feel the necessity for this transformation, but we also feel that in the first place it will require many incarnations, that we must be in the spiritual world again and again between these incarnations, so that at length we may be able to bring about this transformation.

Then we discover something else in the spiritual world. We find that in our present cycle of humanity we have enjoyments and pleasures on the physical plane in which our soul-spiritual nature is entirely submerged, that the enjoyment or the pleasure, assumes a sub-human, I will not say animal character; for pleasure and enjoyment may assume a sub-human character. We find that with enjoyments such as these, we really prepare infinite pain for certain beings in the spiritual world with whom we only meet when we enter this world. And the sight of the pain we cause these beings is so extremely disturbing, so oppressive, filling our soul with such forces, that we cannot well arrive at the harmonious upbuilding of the things necessary for our next incarnation.

As regards what we experience in a different way, as pain and sorrow, it is seen on the spiritual plane that the pain and sorrow we have borne on the physical plane work on and permeate our soul with such force on the spiritual plane that this force becomes will-power. Our soul thereby becomes stronger, and we are able to transform this strength into moral power which we are able to bring back with us again to the physical plane, in order that we may not only have certain capacities, through which we are able to produce something of value to the world around us, but that we may also have the moral power to develop these capacities into character.

We have experiences such as these and many others, directly after the spiritual Midnight Hour of existence. We feel and experience what our value has become through our previous life; we also feel and experience to what capacities we may attain in the future. And after we have lived for a time longer in the spiritual world, there appears from the twilight of our spiritual environment a clear vision, not only of our own past life, but also of all the human beings with whom we were closely connected in that life; people appear in spiritual relations, with whom we have been connected in some way in former stages of existence. It is not as if we had not been with these human beings before—we are always together with those who have been near us in life, in by far the greater portion of the time between death and rebirth—but now, when we meet them again after the Midnight Hour of our spiritual existence, we see clearly in these human beings what we owe to them or they to us. Our point of view is now not merely: such and such was thy relation to these people at such and such a time—we knew this before—but these people are now for us the expression of the compensation for our previous experiences with them. By the manner in which they come before us, we see by what new experience on the physical plane we may have to repay that for which we are indebted to them, or such like. When we confront the souls of these human beings we see, as it were, the activities which in the future must reproduce the relationships we have had with them in the past. This will be best understood if we take an example which is as concrete as possible, an application of what has already been mentioned in previous lectures.

Let us again suppose that we have lied to some one. Then comes the time, when in the spiritual world the possibility arises of our being tormented by the truth, the opposite to our lie. Our relation to this person to whom we have lied so changes during this time, that as often as we see him (and we see him often enough with our spiritual eyes) he causes the truth, the opposite to the lie we have told, to rise within us and this torments us. Thereby arises from deep down within us a tendency which causes us to say: ‘Thou must meet this person again on the earth below and thou must do something that will compensate the wrong thou hast done in telling the lie; for here in the spiritual world thou canst not compensate what has been brought about through thy lie, here thou canst only see quite clearly the effect of a lie in the cosmos. What has been done upon the earth in this way must be made good again upon the earth. We know that in order to make compensation we need forces which can only develop in us when we again possess an earthly body. From this a tendency arises in our soul to take once more on ourselves an earthly body which will give us the opportunity to perform the actions whereby the imperfections we have caused upon earth may be repaired; otherwise, when we have gone through death once more this person will again appear to call forth the torment of the truth.

Thus you see the whole spiritual technique; how in the spiritual world there is produced within us the impulse karmically to make compensation for various things. These compensations occur also in other connections; but of course I should have to enumerate many thousands of cases if I were to speak of all that comes into consideration in respect of this important subject of karma. For example, let us take the following case: Let us suppose we are in the period after the Midnight Hour of existence in the spiritual world, so that we look back at certain pleasures we have had and say: ‘We can change the effects of these experiences into capacities to which we can give expression when we are re-embodied.’ But the following may also happen. We may observe that when we are changing these past experiences into capacities, in this our present condition, certain elemental beings disturb us (this can happen); these elemental beings do not allow us to acquire these capacities. We may then ask ourselves: ‘What can I do now? If I yield to these elemental beings which approach and will not suffer capacities to arise in me, I shall not be able to develop these capacities. But I must develop them. I know that I shall only be able to give the service due to certain people in my next incarnation if I have these capacities.’ As a rule in such cases we decide to acquire these capacities; but we thereby injure the elemental beings which are around us: in a certain way they feel that they are attacked by us. When we acquire these capacities, they feel that their own life is thereby darkened, as if something were taken away from their wisdom. One of the consequences often springing from this is, that when we are reborn we find that one or more human beings are possessed by these elemental beings and are inspired with particularly hostile intentions towards us.

Think how deeply this enables us to see into human experience, how profoundly it teaches us to comprehend human life and really to acquire the right instinct to comport ourselves correctly on the physical plane. But this does not mean that we should ever say, when on the physical plane: ‘At that time I had to protect myself. I have thereby made this person a sworn enemy; I must now give in to him.’ The case might arise where it would be good to yield, but, on the other hand, it might happen that if we yield, these hostile elemental beings who act through one person or another might, through what they now do on the physical plane, compensate themselves abundantly for the loss they suffered through our self-protection. They might go beyond what was taken away from them, and the consequence of this would be that we should not be able to save ourselves from them, when we again enter the corresponding period in the stream of time between death and rebirth, and they would then give the death blow to certain of our capacities.

The world becomes ever more and more complicated when we get real insight into it; but we cannot wonder at this. I might give you other examples of the karmic connections between life on earth and life between death and rebirth. Let us take the case of a person who through illness dies earlier than another who enters into ‘time’, as it were, after a normal length of human life. His illness brings him to an early death; but he really retains certain forces within him which he would have expended if he had reached the normal length of human life. The man would have used these forces, which remain within him as a reserve of strength, if he had not died early, and when the life after death is examined, the spiritual investigator finds that these forces are added to the man's forces of will and feeling, strengthening them. Such a person is in the position so to use, after the Midnight Hour of existence, what has accrued to him through these forces before the Midnight Hour of existence, that he enters earthly life as a man of stronger will and of much more character than if he had not died so early. It is, however, previous karma that determines this and naturally it would be the greatest folly if a person were to think that he would gain what has just been described by bringing about an early death artificially; he would not gain it thus. What happens when an early death is brought about artificially, you will find described in my book Theosophy, so far as it is necessary to explain it. I also referred there to the case where a person meets with an early death through an accident. When he is torn away from the experiences of the physical plane through an accident, while his forces would have still been sufficient to enable him to reach old age, there remains to him a surplus of force and when the Midnight Hour of existence has passed he can use this to strengthen his intellectual powers. We find through spiritual investigation that great inventors are often people who in former incarnations died through an accident. If we really wish to survey these things with understanding, we have to realise that in the spiritual world the standpoint of life is really quite different from what it can be in the physical world.

It will grow more and more comprehensible to you, that in order to understand the spiritual worlds one has first to acquire the necessary conceptions and ideas, because the spiritual worlds are so very different from the physical world. Hence no one should wonder when something relating to the spiritual worlds is described, that when the ideas of the physical world are directed to this description, it should at first be felt to be unsatisfactory. For example, it is a fact, which is confirmed by spiritual investigation into many cases, that if a person dies a thorough materialist, with a materialistic frame of mind, and leaves others behind who are also materialistically inclined, he at first suffers a certain loss in the spiritual world. When he has passed through the portal of death without spiritual inclinations, and wishes to look back at his loved ones on the earth, he cannot see them directly if in their souls there is no spiritual thought; he has knowledge of them only up to the time when he passed through death. His spiritual eyes cannot see what they are now experiencing below upon the earth, because there is no spiritual life in their souls; for only spiritual experience throws light up into the spiritual worlds. Before such a person can see the matter quite clearly, he has to wait until in the spiritual world itself he has developed the necessary forces with which to see clearly that the souls he has left behind are materialistically inclined because they have succumbed to Ahriman. Were he to experience this immediately after death he would be unable to bear it. He has first to grow into the knowledge that materialistically inclined souls are possessed by Ahriman; then he may begin to have vision of these souls, until they have passed the portal of death and in the spiritual world have liberated themselves from their materialistic tendencies. It is only later that he experiences union with them.

Someone might say: These conditions which you describe as taking place after death are not at all consoling. That, my dear friends, is an idea which is gained on the physical plane; it is not an idea that is filled with the understanding of the spiritual worlds. A person living between death and rebirth, comes to a point where he says: ‘Oh, how impossible, how comfortless it would be directly after death to see those souls who are materialistically inclined!’ How infinitely better it is for these souls to pass first through this period of probation! They would lose themselves, they would be unable to reach what they ought to reach if the matter were not arranged in this way. The point of view becomes entirely different when the things of the world are considered from the spiritual side, and a time will come when it will be necessary for man, while still on the physical plane, to have a correct understanding of the truths of Spiritual Science.

Spiritual Science has come into the world because the evolution of humanity requires that the knowledge of the spiritual world and its conditions should enter more and more into human souls, instinctively at first, then consciously. I will draw your attention to a purely external thing which is very important, in order that you may see how we shall be able more and more to judge the true contents of our life on the physical plane through understanding the laws of spiritual existence. It is something external and as an external thing is extremely important. When we consider nature, the remarkable spectacle is presented to us of a small number of seeds being used in every case to continue the same kind of life, but that an extremely large number of seeds come to nothing. We observe myriads of fish eggs in the ocean, a few only of which become fishes, the rest perish. We look out over the fields and see vast quantities of grains of wheat, only a few of which grow into plants, the rest are ground up into flour for human food and for other purposes. A great deal more has to be produced by nature than really becomes fruit and again seed in the regular course of existence. This is a wise regulation of nature; for in nature order and law exist and demand that what thus deviates from its own deeply founded routine of existence and fruiting, should be so used, that it serves the other continuing stream of existence. The various creatures would not be able to live if all seeds actually bore fruit and attained the development possible to them. Beings have to exist, which are used to form the ground-work from which other beings can grow. It is only in appearance that anything is lost, only in maya; in reality nothing is lost in the works of nature. Spirit rules in nature and the fact that something is apparently lost from the continuous stream of evolution is based upon the wisdom of the spirit, it is a spiritual Law, and we must consider this matter from the standpoint of the spirit; we then soon find that what apparently is turned aside from the straight forward stream of events, has its own well justified place in existence. This is founded in the spirit. Hence it may also be of value on the physical plane, in so far as we here live a spiritual life.

Let us consider a case which concerns us very closely. Public lectures have to be given on the subject of Spiritual Science. These are given to a public that is gathered together simply through advertisement. Something happens here which is somewhat similar to the case of the seeds of corn, a part only of which are used in the straight forward stream of existence. One must not be discouraged when, in such circumstances, one has to bring the stream of spiritual life apparently without choice before many, many people, and when only a few separate themselves and really enter into this spiritual life, become anthroposophists, and join the direct stream. Under these circumstances, it still happens that these scattered seeds come to many who, after a public lecture, go away and say, for example, ‘What mad nonsense the fellow talked!’ Seen with respect to external life, this is like the germs—shall we say—like the fish-germs that come to nothing in the ocean; but from the standpoint of a deeper investigation it is not so. Souls who through their karma come to a lecture and who then go away and say: ‘What foolish nonsense the fellow talked!’—these souls are not yet ready to receive the truth of the spirit; but it is necessary for their souls in their present incarnation to feel the approach of the power contained in Spiritual Science. However much they may scold, it remains a force in their souls for their next incarnation. Thus the germs have not been lost; they find a way. Life with respect to spiritual things is under the same laws, whether we follow the spirit in the order of nature, or in the case which we consider to be our own.

Now let us suppose we wished to carry this over into external material life, and were to say: ‘But this is just what happens in outer life.’ Yes, my dear friends, it is exactly because this is happening, that I say that we are living towards a future when this will appear in ever greater degree. More and more articles will be produced, more and more factories will be built. No one now asks, ‘How many articles are needed?’ as was formerly the case, when the tailors in the town only made a suit when someone ordered it. The need then determined the numbers to be made; but now they are produced for the market; the various wares are piled up as much as possible. Production works entirely according to the principle upon which nature works. Nature is carried into the social order, and this will at first gain the upper hand more and more. But here we are considering the material realm. The spiritual law has no application in external life, simply because it is suited only to the spiritual world; and something very remarkable results. As we are speaking among ourselves we may say these things, but at the present day the world will not agree with us in this. Things are now produced for the market regardless of the amount required, not according to what was explained in my essay on Theosophy and Social Life—all that is produced is piled up in warehouses and governed by the money market, and then the producers wait to see how many are bought. This tendency will grow greater and greater until it destroys itself and when I say the following you will know the reason. One who spiritually observes social life, sees the germ of frightful social abscesses springing up everywhere. That is the great social problem confronting those who understand life; that is the frightful fact which is so depressing and which—even if we could suppress all our enthusiasm for Spiritual Science and the impulse which makes us long for it—yet makes us cry out for the remedy for this world disease that is already so far advanced and which will become ever worse and worse. That which in one field, in one sphere, must work as nature works, is seen by one who seeks to spread abroad spiritual truths to become a cancer when it enters the sphere of culture, as we have just described.

It will only be possible to recognise this and find the remedy, when Spiritual Science lays hold of and fills the hearts and minds of men. When one sees these things, one would fain fill one's words with the most intense fire, so that the attention of as many of our contemporaries as are able to understand them may be attracted to the times we are approaching. We can perceive these things when we make ourselves acquainted with the different points of view that exist in one and another spheres of life. These different points of view confront a person, when experiencing the life between the Midnight Hour of existence and rebirth, for it is from them that he must work creatively on himself.

When he has formed the tendencies for the fulfilment of his karma in respect of his more intimate experiences, others rise before his soul which are not so intimate. He experiences the religious and other societies to which he has belonged in such a way that they reveal to him certain things he must do in his following incarnation in order not to become one-sided. In short, this life flows on in such a way that it still alternates between spiritual companionship and spiritual solitude, but its essential task is that the human being then constructs the archetype for his new earthly life in a purely spiritual form.

Long, long before the human being descends to earthly life he has constructed out of the spiritual world the spiritual etheric archetype, which has within it forces, which we might call spiritual magnetic forces. These draw him down to parents in respect of whom he feels that they give him the hereditary attributes which enable him to enter upon a new earthly life. I have already mentioned that the normal time for this is when we have the feeling that we are uniting with that which withdrew from us as the fruit of our last earthly life. But the human being does not always reach this point. When we do come to this point the course of our life is such that we fully feel the connection between the bodily part and the spiritual part, but often the man enters into life too soon. Most people are prematurely born, spiritually, and this is only compensated for later through experiences with which we feel entirely in harmony.

One thing is of very special importance which I mentioned in the last lecture. When our longing for an outer world has reached its greatest intensity because we have entered most deeply into solitude, then it is that the Spirit, which only lives and moves in spiritual worlds, approaches us and changes our longing into a kind of soul-light. Up to this point we must keep our connection with our ‘I’. We must, as it were, preserve the remembrance: Upon earth thou wast this ‘I’; this ‘I’ has to remain to thee as a memory. That man is able to do this in our age depends upon the fact that Christ brought into the earth's aura the power by which we can maintain our memory up to the Midnight Hour, when we again have this ‘I’. Otherwise this could not at the present time have been brought over from our earthly life. If the Christ-impulse had not entered the earth, an interruption would have occurred, a break, in the middle of the period between death and rebirth which would have made our existence inharmonious. Long before the Midnight Hour we should have forgotten that we were an ‘I’ in our last life; we should have felt connection with the spiritual world, but we should have forgotten ourselves. We have to develop our Ego so powerfully on earth, that we gain this Ego-consciousness ever more and more. This has become necessary since the Mystery of Golgotha. But because on earth we attain to an ever great consciousness of our Ego, we thereby exhaust the forces we have need of after death in order that we should really not forget ourselves up to the Midnight Hour of existence. In order to be able to retain this remembrance, we have to die in Christ. For this the Christ-impulse is necessary. It preserves for us up to the Midnight Hour of existence the possibility of not forgetting our ‘I’.

Then at the Midnight Hour of existence the Spirit approaches us. We have now retained the memory of our ‘I’. If we carry this on into the Midnight Hour of existence, to where the Holy Ghost approaches and gives us the vision and the connection with our own inner world, as if with an outer world—if we have kept this connection, the Spirit can then lead us further to our re-embodiment, which we bring about through having formed our archetype in the spiritual world. In reality, however, things do not take place in such a way that one does only what is necessary, but just as a pendulum never rests, but swings to one side so as to swing again to the other, and as it is right this should be so, so is it also with the spiritual life. The Christ-impulse supplies us with more than barely sufficient force just to make the connection, it gives us sometimes so much, that if the Spirit should not come to us, the Christ-impulse would be able to bear us quickly over. We should not be able to make the connection with our memory, but the Christ-impulse would carry us over. This is of great importance; and as we develop on into the future, it will be increasingly necessary for man that he should receive more than merely a bare amount of the Christ-impulse. Even at the present time, it is necessary that man should experience during his earthly life not merely what is absolutely necessary regarding Christ, but that the Christ-impulse should enter into his soul as a mightier impulse, so that it will sweep him rapidly beyond the Midnight Hour of existence. For the force of the Spirit is strengthened through the impulse of Christ, and we feel the force of the Spirit more strongly throughout the second half of our life between death and rebirth, than would be the case if the Christ-impulse were not there.

The surplus of the Christ-impulse that remains with us, strengthens the impulse of the Spirit. Otherwise the Spirit would only be active for the Spirit, and it would cease working when we were born. As we fill ourselves with the Christ-impulse it strengthens the impulse of the Holy Ghost, and thereby such a spiritual impulse is introduced to our souls that, when we enter earthly incarnation, it is not exhausted in this incarnation as are the other forces we bring with us at birth. I have already mentioned that we transform the forces we bring over from the spiritual world into our inner organisation, but the surplus which we gain in this way through the Christ-impulse strengthening the impulse of the Spirit—this we bring over with us into existence, but it does not need to be transformed during our life on earth. The further we advance into the future, the more necessary will human beings be for the development of the earth, human beings who, because they are filled with the Christ-impulse and the impulse of the Spirit, bring something into earthly life with them when they enter their new incarnation. The Spirit must work with greater power, so that it does not only work up to the time of birth, when everything that is brought from the spiritual world is transformed, so that only the tiny amount of consciousness endures which informs us of our physical environment, and of what can be understood by the intellect connected with the brain. If, as we develop towards the future we did not gradually bring with us as human beings a surplus of spirit, as has just been described, humanity would gradually reach the point where it would have no idea that there was a Spirit, then during earthly life only the unspiritual Spirit, Ahriman, would rule, and humanity would only be able to know of the physical world that is perceived by the senses, and of what is comprehended by the intellect that is connected with the brain. In the onward development of mankind, all these things are even now being experienced to a certain extent, even now humanity is in danger of losing the Holy Ghost.

But it will not lose it. Spiritual Science will be the watcher which will see that humanity does not lose the Holy Ghost, this Spirit which approaches the soul at the Midnight Hour of existence, in order to waken within it the longing to see itself in its past and recognise its value. Spiritual Science will have to speak more and more impressively of the Christ-impulse, so that more and more Spirit shall enter into physical existence through birth, in more and more human beings, and so that in this physical existence there shall be more and more human beings who feel: ‘I have certainly within me forces which have to be transformed into organising forces, but there is something also dawning in my soul which need not be transformed. I have brought with me into this physical world some of the Spirit which appertains only to the spiritual worlds, although I am living in my body.’—This is the Spirit which will enable people to see what is spoken of by Theodora in the Mystery Drama, The Portal of Initiation, namely, the etheric form of Christ. The power of the Spirit which thus enters people's bodies will open spiritual eyes through which to see and understand the spiritual worlds. First, people will have to understand them, and then they will begin with understanding to behold them; vision will come, because the Spirit so lays hold of people's souls that they will be able to bring this Spirit into their bodies, and the Spirit will shine out even in their earthly incarnations; it will dawn first in a few, and then in a larger number. So we may say: Through the Spirit, through the Holy Ghost we are awakened in the great Midnight Hour of existence. So also from another side we may say—when we bear in mind what the Spirit provides for earthly evolution in the future:—the best part of the soul, that by which we are enabled to see into the spiritual worlds, will be awakened more and more by the Holy Ghost even when in the physical body. As man is awakened by the Holy Ghost in the Midnight Hour of existence, so also will he be awakened while living in his physical body on the physical plane. He will waken inwardly through the Spirit rousing him out of the sleep of sense; otherwise through mere sense-perception and through the intellect that is connected with the brain, man would always remain asleep. The Spirit will shine into this human sleep, which as it developed toward the future would otherwise gradually overcome humanity. The spirit in man will shine into this sleep even during physical existence. In the midst of the decline of spiritual life, in the midst of spiritual death, caused by an outlook based merely on sense-perception and a brain-bound intellect, the souls of men will be awakened by the Holy Ghost—even now during physical existence:

PER SPIRITUM SANCTUM REVIVISCIMUS

Anyone who wishes to attach any value to the form of spiritual-scientific world view that I will be speaking about today and tomorrow will need to familiarize themselves with the peculiar contradiction inherent in the development of humanity, namely that a spiritual current, a spiritual impulse, can be eminently timely from a certain higher point of view, and that this timeliness is nevertheless at first sharply rejected by contemporaries, rejected in a way that one might say is thoroughly understandable.

The impulse for a new view of the universe of space, which Copernicus gave at the dawn of the new era, was timely from the point of view that the development of humanity at the time of Copernicus made it necessary for this impulse to come. This impulse proved to be quite untimely for a long time to come, in that it was opposed by all those who wanted to hold on to old habits of thought, to prejudices that were centuries and millennia old. To the followers of spiritual science, this spiritual scientific world view appears to be in keeping with the times, and it is out of date from the point of view of those who still judge it from that perspective. Nevertheless, I believe that in the course of today's and tomorrow's lecture I will be able to show that in the subconscious depths of the soul of contemporary humanity there exists something like a yearning for this spiritual-scientific world view and something like a hope lives for it:

As it presents itself at first, this spiritual science wants to be a genuine continuation of the scientific work of the spirit, as it has been done in the last centuries. And it would be quite wrong to believe that this spiritual science somehow developed opposition to the great triumphs, to the immense achievements and the far-sighted truths that natural scientific thinking of the last centuries has brought. On the contrary, what natural science was and is for the knowledge of the external world, that this spiritual science wants to be for the knowledge of the spiritual world. In this way, it could almost be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, although this will still be doubted in the broadest circles today.

In order to give an idea, not a proof, but initially an idea that should lead to understanding, the following is said about the relationship between the spiritual science meant here and the scientific world view: If we look at the great, powerful of the development of natural science knowledge in the last three to four centuries, we say that on the one hand it has brought immeasurable truths across the broad horizon of human knowledge, and on the other hand that this thinking has been incorporated into practical life. Everywhere we see the benefits of this in the fields of technology and commerce, which have been brought to us by the laws and insights of natural science that have been incorporated into practical life. If we now wish to form an idea of the attitude of spiritual science to these advances, we can begin by making a comparison. We can look at the farmer who cultivates his field and reaps the fruits of the field. The greater part of these fruits of the field are taken into human life and used for human sustenance; only a small part remains. This is used for the new sowing of the fruits. Only the latter part can be said to be allowed to follow the driving forces, the inner life and formative forces that lie in the sprouting grain, in the sprouting fruit itself. What is brought into the barns is mostly diverted from its own developmental progress, is, as it were, led into a side stream, used for human food, and does not directly continue what lies in the germs, what the own driving forces are.

Thus, the spiritual science referred to here appears to be more or less what natural science has brought in the way of knowledge in recent centuries. By far the greatest part of this has rightly been used to gain insight into external, sensual-spatial facts, and has been used for human benefit. But there is something left over in the human soul from the ideas that the study of nature has provided in recent centuries that is not used to understand this or that in the sensual world, that is not used to build machines or maintain industries, but that is brought to life so that it is preserved in its own right, like grain that is used for sowing again and allowed to follow its own laws of formation. man imbues himself with the wonderful fruits of knowledge that natural science has brought forth, when he allows this to live in his soul, when he has a feeling for asking: How can the life of the soul be illuminated and recognized through the concepts and ideas that natural science has provided? How can one live with these ideas? How can one use them to understand the main driving forces of human soul life? If the human soul has a feeling for raising these questions with the spiritual treasure acquired, not in theory but with the full wealth of soul life, then what can only now, in our time, when science has been cultivated on its own ground, so to speak, for a while, merge into human culture.

And in another respect too, this spiritual science can be called a child of the scientific way of thinking, only the spirit must be investigated in a different way from nature. Precisely if one wants to approach the spirit with the same certainty, method and scientific basis as natural science approaches nature, then one must transform scientific thinking and shape it in such a way that it becomes a suitable tool for the knowledge of the spirit. These lectures will share some insights into how this can be achieved. Especially when one is firmly grounded in natural science, one realizes that the means by which it works cannot be used to gain spiritual knowledge. Time and again, enlightened minds have spoken of the fact that, starting from the firm ground of natural science, man must recognize that his power of knowledge is limited. Natural science and Kantianism — to mention only these — have contributed to the belief that the cognitive powers of the human mind are limited, that man cannot penetrate through his knowledge into the regions where the source lies, to which the soul must feel connected; where man realizes that not only the forces that can be grasped by natural science are at work, but other forces as well. In this respect spiritual science completely agrees with natural science. Precisely for the cognitive abilities that natural science has magnified, and on which natural science must also stop as such, there is no possibility of penetrating into the spiritual realm.

But in the human soul lie dormant other cognitive faculties, cognitive faculties that cannot be used in everyday life and in the hustle and bustle of ordinary science, but that can be brought forth from this human soul and that, when they are brought forth, when they are, as it were, from the hidden depths of the human soul, then they make something different out of the person: they permeate him with a new kind of knowledge, with a kind of knowledge that can penetrate into areas that are closed to mere natural science. It is (I attach no special value to the expression, but it clarifies the matter) a kind of spiritual chemistry through which one can penetrate into the spiritual regions of existence, but a chemistry that only bears a similarity to external chemistry in terms of secure logic and methodical thinking: it is the chemistry of the human soul itself. And from this point of view, in order to make ourselves understood, I will say the following by way of comparison: when we have water before us, this water has certain properties. The chemist comes and shows that this water contains hydrogen and oxygen. Take hydrogen: it burns, it is gaseous, it is quite different from water. Would someone who knew nothing about chemistry ever be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Water is liquid, does not burn, and even extinguishes fire. Hydrogen burns, is a gas. In short, would someone be able to tell from looking at water that it contains hydrogen? Nevertheless, the chemist comes and separates the hydrogen from the water. Man can be compared to water as he appears in everyday life, as he appears to ordinary science. In him are united the physical and the bodily and the spiritual-soul. External science and the world view that is based on it are quite right when they say: Yes, this person standing before us cannot be seen to have a spiritual-soul within him; and it is understandable when a world view completely denies this soul-spiritual. But that is just as if one were to deny the nature of hydrogen.

However, there is a need for proof that the spiritual-soul can really be represented separately from the human being, separate from the physical body, in spiritual-soul chemistry. This can be. That there is such a spiritual-mental chemistry is what spiritual science has to say to mankind today, just as Copernicanism had to say to a surprised mankind that the earth does not stand still, but moves around the sun at a furious pace, but the sun stands still. And just as Copernican writings were on the Index until well into the 19th century, so too will the insights of spiritual science be on the Index of other worldviews for a long time to come. These are worldviews that cannot free themselves from centuries-old prejudices and habits of thought. And the fact that this spiritual science can already, to a certain extent, touch hearts and souls, that it is not exactly outside the search of our time, we have a small proof of this, which I do not want to boast about, but which may be mentioned as a testimony to, I would say, the hidden timeliness of spiritual science in souls. Are we indeed in a position, already in our time, to build a free school of spiritual science on free Swiss soil; and can we not see, through the understanding of the friends of this spiritual current, the emblem of the same in the new architectural style of the double-domed rotunda, which is to rise from Dornach's heights, near Basel, as a first external monument to what this spiritual science has to offer to modern culture? That this building is already being erected, that the forms of its domes are already rising above the rotunda, allows us today to speak of spiritual science with much more hope and inner satisfaction, despite all the opposition, despite all the lack of understanding that it encounters and must still encounter in wide circles.

What I have called spiritual chemistry is certainly not something that can be achieved through external methods that can be seen with the eyes and that are brought about by external actions. What can be called spiritual chemistry takes place only in the human soul itself, and the procedures are of an intimate soul-spiritual nature, procedures that do not leave the soul as it is in everyday life, but which affect this soul in such a way that it changes, that it becomes a completely different tool of knowledge than it usually is. And they are not some kind of, one might say, miraculous exercises, some exercises taken from superstition, which are thus applied in spiritual chemistry, but they are thoroughly inner, spiritual-soul exercises, which build on what is also present in everyday life: powers of the soul , which are always there, which we need in everyday life, but which, in this everyday life, I would say, are only used incidentally, but which must be increased immeasurably, must strengthen themselves into the unlimited if man is to become truly a spiritual knower.

The one power that is active in our whole soul life, more incidentally, but must be increased immeasurably, we can call it: attention. What is attention? Well, we do not let the life that flows past the soul shape itself; we gather ourselves up inwardly to turn our spiritual gaze to this or that. We pick out individual things, place them in the field of vision of our consciousness, and concentrate the soul forces on these details. And we may say: Only in this way is our soul life, which needs activity, also possible in everyday life, that we can develop such an interest that highlights individual events and facts and entities from the passing stream of existence. This attention is absolutely necessary in ordinary life. One will understand more and more, especially when spiritual science also penetrates a little into the soul, that what people call the memory question is basically only an attentiveness question, and that will throw important light on all educational questions. One can almost say that the more one endeavors to put the soul into the activity of attentiveness again and again, already in the growing and also in the later human being, the more the memory is strengthened. Not only does it work better for the things we have paid attention to, but the more often we can exercise this attention, the more our memory grows, the more intensively it develops. And another thing: Who has not heard today of that sad manifestation of the soul that could be called the discontinuity of consciousness? There are people today who cannot look back on their past life and remember it in its entirety, who do not know afterwards: You were with your ego in this or that experience; who do not know what they have been through. It may happen that such people leave their home because they have lost the consistency in their mental experience; that they leave their home without rhyme or reason, that they go through the world as if with the loss of their own self, so that it takes them years to find their self again and to be able to pick up where their self left off. Such phenomena would never lead to the tragedy that they often do if it were known that this integrity, this consciousness of being fully aware of oneself, also depends on the correct development of the activity of attention.

Thus, the exercise of attention is something we absolutely need in our ordinary lives. The spiritual researcher must take it up, develop it into a special inner soul strengthening, deepen it into what could be called meditation, concentration. These are the technical terms for the matter. Just as in our ordinary life, prompted by life itself, we turn our attention to this or that object, so the spiritual researcher, out of inner soul methodology, turns all soul powers to a presentation, an image, a sensation, a will impulse, an emotional mood that he can survey, that is quite clear before his soul, and on which he concentrates all the soul's powers; but he concentrates in such a way that he has suppressed, as only otherwise in deep sleep, all sensory activity directed towards the outside world, so that he has brought all thinking and striving, all worries and affects of life to a standstill, as otherwise only in deep sleep. In relation to ordinary life, man does indeed become as he otherwise does in deep sleep; only that he does not lose consciousness, that he keeps it fully awake. But all the powers of the soul, which are otherwise scattered on external experience, on the worries and concerns of existence, are concentrated on the one idea, feeling or other that has been placed by will into the center of the human soul life. As a result, the powers of the soul are concentrated and that which otherwise only slumbers, only works for this life as it were between the lines of life, that power is brought to the fore, is shaped out of the human soul; and it actually comes about that through this inner strengthening of the human soul in the concentrated activity, in the attention increased to the immeasurable, this soul learns to experience itself in such a way that it becomes capable of consciously tearing itself out of the physical-sensual body, as hydrogen is dissolved out of water by the chemical method.

However, it is an inner soul development that takes years if the spiritual researcher wants to enable his soul to tear itself away from the physical body through such attention and concentration exercises. But then the time comes when the spiritual researcher knows how to connect a meaning to the word, oh, to the word that sounds so paradoxical to today's world, to the word that seems so fantastic to this world: I experience myself as a spiritual being outside of my body and I know that this body is outside of my soul – well, like the table is outside of my body. I know that the soul, inwardly strengthened, can experience itself in this way, even if it has the body before it like a foreign object, this body with all the destinies that it undergoes in the ordinary outer life. In what he otherwise is, the human being will completely express himself as a spiritual-soul entity separate from his body. And this spiritual-soul entity then displays very different qualities than it does when it is connected to the physical-sensual body and makes use of the intellect bound to the brain.

First of all, the power of thought detaches itself from physical experience. Since I do not want to speak in abstractions, but rather report on real facts, please do not be put off by the fact that I want to describe, unembellished and without prejudice, what may still sound paradoxical today. When the spiritual researcher begins to associate a meaning with the word: You now live in your soul, you know that your soul is a truly spiritual being in which you experience yourself when you are outside of your senses and your brain, then he initially feels with his thinking as if outside of his brain, surrounding and living in his head. Yes, he knows that as long as one is in the physical body between birth and death, one must return again and again to the body. The spiritual researcher knows exactly how to observe the moment when he, after having lived with the pure spiritual-soul, returns with his thinking to his brain. He experiences how this brain offers resistance, feels how he, as it were, submerges with the waves of his earlier, purely spiritual life and then slips into his physical brain, which now, in its own activity, follows what the spiritual-soul accomplishes. This experience outside of the body and this re-immersion into the body is one of the most harrowing experiences for the spiritual researcher.

But this thinking, which is purely experiencing itself and takes place outside the brain, presents itself differently from ordinary thinking. Ordinary thoughts are shadowy compared to the thoughts that now stand before the spiritual researcher like a new world when he is outside his body. Thoughts permeate each other with inner pictorialness. That is why we call what presents itself to the spiritual eye: imaginations - but not because we believe that these only contain something fantastic or imagined, but because what is perceived there is actually experienced is experienced, imagined; but this imagination is an immersion in the things themselves, one experiences the things and processes of the spiritual world, and the things and processes of the spiritual world present themselves in imaginations before the soul. —- Thus thinking can be separated from the physical-bodily life, and the spiritual researcher can know himself in a world of spiritual processes and entities.

But other human faculties can also be detached from the purely physical and bodily. When the thinking is detached, the spiritual researcher experiences himself first in his purely spiritual and soul-like essence, after all that has been described so far. But what he experiences there with the things and processes in the spiritual world is a completely different way of perceiving than the ordinary perception. When we usually perceive things, they are there and we are here; they confront us. This is not the case from the moment we enter a spiritual world in our spiritual and soul experience, which arises around us with the same necessity as colors and light arise around the blind man when he has undergone an operation. No, we do not experience the spiritual world in the same way as the external world. This experience is such that one does not merely have the things and beings of the spiritual world before one, but one submerges oneself in them with one's entire being. Then one knows: one perceives the things and beings by having flowed into them with one's being and perceiving that which is in them in such a way that they reproduce themselves in the images that one sees. One feels that all perception is a reproduction. One feels that one is in a state of constant activity. Therefore, one could call this revival of the imaginative world of thought a spiritual mimic, a spiritual play of expressions. One tears oneself out of the bodily with its soul-spiritual; but this soul-spiritual is in perpetual activity and submerges into the processes of the spiritual world and imitates what lives in them as their own powers; and one feels so connected with the beings that one can compare this submerging with standing before a person and intuiting what is going on in his life, and having such an inner experience of it that one would show the expression of sorrow in one's own countenance if the other were sad, and show the expression of joy in one's own countenance if the other were joyful. Thus one experiences spiritually and soulfully what others are experiencing; one becomes the expression of it oneself. In the spiritual countenance, one expresses the essence of things. One is driven to active perception. One may say: spiritual research makes quite different demands on the human soul than external research, which passively accepts things. The soul is required to be inwardly active and to be able to immerse itself in things and beings and to express itself in the way that things present themselves to it.

Just as the power of thought, as a spiritual-soul power, can be separated out of the physical-bodily in spiritual chemistry, so can another power, which man otherwise only uses in the body, which, so to speak, pours itself into the body, be separated out of this body. However strange it may sound, this other power is the power of speech, the power that we otherwise use in ordinary life when speaking.

What happens when we speak? Our thoughts live within us, our thoughts vibrate with our brain; this is connected to the speech apparatus, muscles are set in motion; what we experience inwardly flows out into the words and lives in the words. From the point of view of spiritual science, we must say that in speaking we pour out what is in our soul into physical organs. The detachment of the speech power from the physical-sensory body arises from the fact that the human being increases attention, as described, and adds something else – again, an activity that is usually already present and must also be increased to an unlimited degree. This power is devotion.

We know it in those moments when we feel religious, when we are devoted to this or that being in love, when we can follow things and their laws in strict research, when we can forget ourselves with all our feelings and thoughts. We know this devotion. It actually only flows between the lines of ordinary life. The spiritual researcher must increase this power to infinity; he must strengthen it without limit. He must indeed be able to give himself up to the stream of existence in such a way as he is otherwise only given up to this stream of existence – without doing anything himself to what he experiences – in deep sleep, when all the activity of his limbs rests, when all the senses are silent, when man is only completely given up and does nothing; but then he has lapsed into unconsciousness in his sleep. But if a person can bring himself by inner volition to do it again and again as an exercise for his soul, to suppress all sensory activity, to suppress all movement of the limbs, to transfer his physical-sensual life into a state that is otherwise only in deep sleep, but to remain awake, to keep his inner and develops the feeling of being poured into the stream of existence, wanting nothing but what the world wants with one: if he evokes this feeling again and again, but evokes it apart from attention, then the soul strengthens itself more and more.

But the two exercises - the one with attention and the one with devotion - must be done separately from each other; because they contradict each other. If attention requires the highest level of concentration on one object - deep meditation - then devotion, passive devotion to the flow of existence, requires an immense increase in the feeling that we find in religious experience or in other devotion to a loved one. The fruits that man draws from such an immeasurable increase of devotion and attention are precisely that he separates his spiritual-soul life from the physical-bodily. And so the power that otherwise pours into the word, that is activated by it not remaining within itself but setting the nerves in motion, this power can be separated from the outer speech activity and remain within itself in the soul-spiritual. In this way, the power of speech – we can call it that – is torn out of its sensual-physical context, and the person experiences what, in Goethe's words, can be called spiritual hearing, spiritual listening.

Once again, the human being experiences himself outside of his body, but now in such a way that he submerges himself in things and perceives the inner essence of things; but also perceives it in such a way that he recreates it within himself, as with an inner gesture, not just with a facial expression, but with an inner gesture, as with an inner gesture. The soul-spiritual, torn out of the body, is thus activated, as when we are tempted, through a special disposition in relation to our talent for imitation, to express through our gesture what occupies us. What is done only by special talents, the soul, which is torn out of the body, does in order to perceive. It plunges into things, and it actively recreates the forces that are at play within them. All this perception in the spiritual world is an activity in which one engages, and by perceiving the activity in which one has to place oneself, because one recreates the inner weaving and essence of things, one perceives these things. In the outer, sensory world, hearing is passive; we listen. Speaking and hearing flow together in spiritual hearing. We immerse ourselves in the essence of things; we hear their inner weaving. What Pythagoras called the music of the spheres is something that the spiritual researcher can truly achieve. He immerses himself in the things and beings of the spiritual world and hears, but also speaks by uttering. What one experiences is a speaking hearing, a hearing speaking in immersing oneself in the essence of things. It is true inspiration that arises.

And a third inner activity, a third kind of inner experience, can come over the spiritual researcher if he continues to develop increased attention and devotion. What occurs to and in the spiritual researcher as he experiences himself outside his body, I would like to discuss it in the following way.

Let us consider the child. I cannot speak about this in detail, I only want to hint at what is important for the purpose of today's lecture: it is a peculiarity of the growing human being that he must give himself his direction in space, that he must give himself the way in which he is placed in space, in the course of childhood. The human being is born unable to walk or stand, initially, as we say here in Austria, having to use all fours. Then he develops those inner powers that I would call powers of uprightness, and through this something comes to the fore in man that so many deeper minds have sensed in its significance by saying: because man can rise in the vertical direction, he knows how to direct his gaze out into the vastness of the celestial space, his gaze does not merely cling to earthly things. But the essential thing is that through inner forces, through inner strength and experience, man develops out of his helpless horizontal life, so to speak, into an upright vertical life. The scientist will readily understand that the inner activity of man is something quite different from the hereditary forces that give the animal its powers of orientation in the world. The forces at work in the animal that bring the animal in this or that direction to the vertical act quite differently in man, in whom a sum of forces is at work that pulls him out of his helpless situation and that works inwardly to instruct him in the direction of space through which he is actually an earthly man in the true sense of the word, through which he first becomes what he is as a human being on earth. These forces work very much in secret. One can only cope with them when one has already delved a little into spiritual science; but it is a whole system, a great sum of forces. They are not all used up in the childlike period of man, when he learns to stand and walk. There are still forces of this kind slumbering within man; but they remain unused in the outer life of the senses and in the outer life of science.

Through the exercises of increased attention and devotion performed by the soul, the human being becomes inwardly aware of how these forces that have raised him as a child are seated within him. He becomes aware of spiritual powers of direction and of spiritual powers of movement, and the consequence of this is that he is able to add to the inner mimic, to the inner play of the features, to the inner ability to make gestures, to the inner gesture, also the inner physiognomy of his spiritual and soul life. When the soul and spirit have emerged from the physical body, when a person begins to understand as a spiritual researcher what is meant by the words: 'You experience yourself in the soul and spirit' — then the time also comes when he becomes aware of the forces that have raised him up, that have placed him vertically on the earth as a physical, sensual being. He now applies these powers in the purely spiritual-soul realm, and this enables him to use these powers differently than he does in his ordinary life; he is able to give these powers other directions, to shape himself differently than he did in physical experience during his childhood. He now knows how to develop inner movements, knows how to adapt to all directions, knows how to give his spiritual self different physiognomies than as an earthly human being; he is able to delve into other spiritual processes and beings; he knows how to connect that he transforms the powers which otherwise change him from a crawling child to an upright human being, that he transforms these in the inner spiritual things and entities, so that he becomes similar to these things and entities and thus expresses them himself and perceives them through this. That is real intuition. For the real perception of spiritual entities and processes is an immersion in them, is an assumption of their own physiognomy. While one experiences the processes in the beings through inner mimicry, while one experiences the mobility of the spiritual beings by being able to recreate their gestures; one is now able to transform oneself into things and processes, one is able to take on the form of the spiritual, and in so doing one perceives it, that one has become it oneself, so to speak.

I did not want to describe to you in general philosophical terms the way in which the spiritual researcher enters into the spiritual worlds. I wanted to describe to you as concretely as possible how this spiritual-soul experience breaks away from the bodily, from physical-sensory perception, and submerges into the spiritual world by becoming active in it. But this has become evident, that every step into the spiritual world must be accompanied by activity, that we must know with every step that things do not reveal their essence to us, but that we can only know that about things and processes of the spiritual world, which we are able to recreate, to search for, by being able to behave actively perceptively. This is the great difference between spiritual knowledge and ordinary external knowledge: that external knowledge is passively surrendered to things, while spiritual knowledge must live in perpetual activity, man must become what he wants to perceive.

Even today, or one could also say, even today, one is forgiven when one speaks of a spiritual world in general. People still put up with that. But it still seems paradoxical in our time that someone can say: A person can detach themselves from all seeing, hearing, all sensory perceptions, all thinking that is tied to the nerves and brain, and then, while everything that is experienced in physical existence disappears completely before them, can feel surrounded, know that they are surrounded by a completely new, concrete world, indeed, by a world in which processes and beings are purely spiritual, just as processes and beings in the physical world are physical. Spiritual science is not a vague pantheism, it is not a general sauce of spiritual life. In the face of spiritual science, if one speaks only of a pantheistic spiritual being, it is as if one said: I lead you to a meadow, something sprouts there, that is nature; then one leads him into a laboratory and says: That is nature, pan-nature! All the flowers and beetles and trees and shrubs, all the chemical and physical processes: Pan-Nature! People would be little satisfied with such Pan-Nature; because they know that you can only get along if you can really follow the individual. Just as little as the external science speaks of Pan-Nature, just as little spiritual science speaks of a general spirit sauce; it speaks of real, perceptible, concrete spiritual processes and entities. It must not be afraid to challenge time by saying: Just as we, when we are in the physical world, first see people around us as physical beings among, one might say, the hierarchies of physical beings, of minerals, plants, animals and human beings, the same fades from our spiritual horizon when we immerse ourselves in the spiritual world; but spiritual realms and hierarchies emerge: beings that are initially the same as human beings, beings that are higher than human beings; and just as animals, plants and minerals descend from human beings in the physical world, there are beings and creatures ascending from human beings into higher realms of existence, individual, unique spiritual entities and creatures.

How the human soul places itself in the spiritual world, what its life is like within this spiritual world according to spiritual research, which in principle has been indicated today; how the human soul has to live in this spiritual world when it lays aside the physical body at death, when it traverses the path after passing through the gate of death, in a purely spiritual world, will be the subject of the day after tomorrow. The lecture the day after tomorrow will deal with individual insights of spiritual science about this life after death.

What spiritual science develops as its method – well, you notice it immediately – it differs very significantly from what our contemporaries can admit as such, based on the thought habits that have formed over the centuries and which are just as stuck in relation to this spiritual science as the thought habits of past centuries were stuck in relation to the Copernican world system. But how should spiritual science think about the search of our time if it wants to understand itself correctly and behave correctly towards this search of our time?

The first objection that can so easily be made from our time is that one says: Yes, the spiritual scientist speaks of the fact that the soul should first develop special powers; then it can look into the spiritual world. But for the one who has not yet developed these powers, who has not yet mastered the art of forming mental images, of separating thought, of separating the powers of speech, of separating the powers of spatial orientation, of separating the powers of orientation in the world of beings, the spiritual world would be of no concern to him! Such an objection is just like that of someone who would say: For someone who cannot paint, pictures are of no concern. — That would be a pity. Only someone who has learned to paint can paint pictures. But it would be sad if the only pictures a person who could paint could understand were those that had to do with the world of nature. Of course, only the painter can paint it; but when the picture stands before man, it is the case that the human soul has the very natural powers within itself to understand the picture, even if it is not able to paint it. And the human soul has a language within itself that connects it to the living art. Such is the case with spiritual science. Only he who has become a spiritual researcher himself can discover and describe the facts, processes and entities of the spiritual world; but when the spiritual researcher endeavors — as has been attempted today, for example, with regard to the spiritual scientific method — to clothe what he has researched in the spiritual world in the words of ordinary thoughts and ideas , then what he gives can be grasped by every soul, even if it has not become a spiritual researcher; if it can only do away with all that comes from contemporary education, from education that pretends to stand on the firm ground of natural science, but in truth does not stand on it at all, but only believes it. If only the soul can rid itself of all prejudices, if it can truly devote itself to the contemplation of a picture as impartially as the mind researcher knows how to tell, then the result of spiritual research can be understood by every soul. Human souls are predisposed to truth and to the perception of truth, not to the perception of untruth and falsity, if only they clear away all the debris that accumulates from prejudice. Deep within the human soul is a secret, intimate language, the language by which everyone at every level of education and development can understand the spiritual researcher, if only they want to.

But this is precisely what the spiritual scientist finds in the search of our time. In past centuries, people believed that they could only know something about the spiritual world through religious beliefs; in recent times, these souls have been able to believe that certain knowledge can only be built on external facts; in our time, souls do not yet know this in their superconsciousness, as one might say – what they can realize in concepts and ideas and feelings, it is not yet settled -, but for the spiritual researcher it is clear: we live in a time in which, in the depths of human souls, in those depths of which these souls themselves do not yet know much, longing for spiritual science, hope for this spiritual science, is being prepared. More and more it will be recognized that old prejudices must vanish. Especially in regard to thinking many things will be recognized. Thus there will still be many people today, especially those who believe themselves to be standing on firm philosophical ground, who will say: Has not Kant proved it, has not physiology proved it, that man cannot penetrate below the sense world with his knowledge? And now along comes a spiritual science that wants to refute Kant, wants to show that what modern physiology so clearly demonstrates is not correct! Yes, spiritual science does not even want to show that what Kant says from his point of view and what modern physiology says from its point of view is incorrect; but time, the still secret search of time, will learn that there is another point of view regarding right and wrong than the one we have become accustomed to. Let us see how the real practice of life – the practice of life that is the fruitful one – relates to these things.

Someone could prove by strict arguments that man with his eyes is incapable of seeing cells, for example. Such a line of argument could be quite correct, as correct as Kant's proof that man, with the abilities that Cart knows, cannot penetrate into the essence of things. Let us assume that microscopic research did not yet exist and it was proved that man cannot see the smallest particles. This may be correct. The proof can be absolutely conclusive in every respect and nothing could be said against the strict proof that man with his eyes cannot see the smallest partial organisms of the large organisms. But that was not the point in the real progress of research; there it was important to show, despite the correctness of this proof, that physical tools can be found, microscope, telescope and others, to achieve what cannot be achieved at all demonstrably if the abilities remain unarmed, which man has. Those are right who say: Human abilities are limited; but spiritual science does not contradict them, it only shows that there is a spiritual strengthening and reinforcement of the human powers of cognition, just as there is a physical strengthening, and that despite the correctness of the opposite train of thought, fruitful spiritual research must place itself precisely beyond such correctness and incorrectness. People will learn to no longer insist on what can be proved with the limited means of proof available; they will realize that life makes other demands on the development of humanity than what is sometimes called immediately and logically certain.

And another thing must be said if the real, not merely the imagined, search of the time is to be related to what spiritual research really has as its task, as its goal. Once again, reference may be made to the truly tremendous progress of natural science. It is not surprising, in view of these great and powerful advances in natural science, that there are minds today that believe they can build a world structure on the firm ground of natural science, which, however, does not reflect on such forces as have been discussed today. Today there is a widespread, I might say materialistically colored school of thought; but it calls itself somewhat nobler because the term 'materialistic' has fallen out of favor: the monistic school of thought. This monistic school of thought, whose head is certainly the important in his scientific field Ernst Haeckel and whose field marshal is Wilhelm Ostwald. This school of thought attempts to construct a world view by building on the insights that can be gained purely from the knowledge of nature. The search of the time will come to the following conclusion in relation to such an attempt: as long as natural science stops at investigating the laws of the outer sense existence, at visualizing the connections in this outer sense existence of the soul, as long as natural science stands on firm ground. And it has truly achieved a great thing; it has achieved the great thing of thoroughly extinguishing the light of life of old prejudices. Just as Faust himself stood before nature and resorted to an external, material magic, so today, anyone who understands science can no longer resort to such material magic. But it is something else that spiritual life itself, in the ways that have been characterized, imposes an inner magic on the soul. But against all these superstitious currents of thought, against everything that seeks to explain external nature in the same way that we might explain a clock, by saying that there are little spirits inside it, and against every explanation of nature that finds this or that being behind natural phenomena, natural science has achieved great things in negation, and as a worldview. And let us take a look at how the so-called scientific view of nature works, as long as the minds can deal with eliminating the old, unhealthy concepts of all kinds of spiritual beings that are invented behind nature. As long as a front can be made against such spiritual endeavors, a scientific worldview thrives on fighting what had to be fought.

But this fight has in a sense already passed its peak, has already done its good; and today the search of the time goes to ask: By what means can we build a world view in which the human soul has space in it? Since this scientific worldview, this Haeckel-Ostwald materialism fails completely when the person understands himself correctly. It will become more and more evident that the champions of the purely materialistic world-view, in their capacity as soldiers, are great in combating ancient superstition, but that they are like warriors who have done their duty and now have no talent for developing the arts of peace, for developing industry, for tilling the soil. Natural science should not be belittled when it becomes a world view in order to combat superstitious beliefs. As long as such world view thinkers can stop at the fight, they still have something in the fight in the soul that sustains them, but when the person then wants to build a real world view in which the soul has a place, then they are like the warrior who has no talent for the arts of peace. He stands before the question of his soul, let us say, in the peacetime of worldly life, and an image of the world does not build itself up.

Such a mood will assert itself more and more in the souls; the spiritual researcher can already see these moods in the depths of the souls. Where these souls know nothing about it, the longings for what spiritual research wants to bring to the world prevail. That is the secret of our time. But if, from a higher point of view, one might say, it is thoroughly in keeping with the times, this spiritual research world view is out of touch with many contemporaries who do not yet look deeply into what they themselves actually want. Therefore, this spiritual science initially brings a world view that is seen as if it does not stand on firm scientific ground. The other world view, that of so-called monism, wants to be built solely on the foundation of external science. This world view, one can see today from its reverse side, where it must lead if the soul really wants to see its hopes and longings fulfilled. In the activity of spiritual research, of which has been spoken, what really elevates the soul to the spiritual community arises for the soul, the spiritual world arises in perceptible activity, in active perception. Through spiritual science, man can again know of the true spiritual world, of spiritual reality. The so-called monistic world view has nothing to say about this. The spiritual search of our time.

But this seeking of our time, this seeking of human souls, cannot be suppressed, and so some of our contemporaries have already become accustomed to placing their thoughts about spiritual things within themselves in such a way that these thoughts run like scientific thoughts: that the external is observed in passive devotion. What has happened? The result is that a part of our contemporaries — those who occupy themselves with it, they know it — have fallen into the habit of wanting to look at the spiritual as one looks at the sensual. I am not saying that some things that are absolutely true cannot come about in this way; but the method of such an approach is different from that of spiritual science. What is called spiritualism wants to look at spiritual beings and processes externally, without active inner perception, without rising into the spiritual worlds, externally passively, as one looks at physical-sensory processes. Whose child is purely external, we may say materialistic spiritualism? It is the child of that school of thought that takes the so-called monistic point of view and succumbs to the superstition of materialism, the mere workings of external natural laws. What — some contemporary will say — spiritism, a child of Haeckel's genuine monism? — The search of the time will be convinced that it is just with this child as with other children. Many a father and mother has the most beautiful ideas about all the things that should develop in a child, and yet sometimes a real rascal can arise. What monism dreams of as a true cultural child is not important; what is important is what really arises. Mere belief in the material will produce the belief that spirits too can only operate and reveal themselves materially. And the more pure monistic materialism would grow, the more spiritualist societies and spiritualist views would flourish everywhere as the necessary counter-image. The more the blind adherents of the Haeckel and Ostwald direction will succeed in pushing back true spiritual science in matters of world view, the more they will see that they will cultivate spiritualism, the other side of true spiritual research. As firmly as the spiritual researcher stands on the ground of the researchable, the knowable, the knowable spiritual life, he can no more follow the method that wants to materialize the spirit and passively surrender to what is spirit, while one can only experience it in the active.

But I would also like to characterize the quest of our time, which cannot yet be understood in terms of another. A man who deserves a certain amount of esteem as a philosopher has written a curious essay in a widely read journal. In it he writes, for example, that Spinoza and Kant are quite difficult for some people to read. You read yourself into them; but the concepts just wander around and swirl around – well, it is certainly not to be denied that it is so for many people when they want to read themselves into Kant or Spinoza, that the concepts swirl around in confusion. But the philosopher gives advice on how this could be done differently, in line with the search of our time. He says: Today we have a device, a technical advance, through which what is presented to the soul in the merely abstract thoughts of Kant and Spinoza can be brought to the soul quite vividly, so that one can passively surrender to it in perception. The philosopher wants to show in a kind of cinematograph how Spinoza sits down, first grinds glass, how then the idea of expansion comes over him - this is shown in changing pictures. The picture of expansion changes into the picture of thinking and so on. And so the whole ethics and world view of Spinoza could be vividly constructed in a cinematographic way. The outer search of the time would thus be taken into account. It is remarkable that the editor of the journal in question even made the following comment: “In this way, the age-old metaphysical need of man could be met by an invention that some people consider to be a gimmick, but which is very much in keeping with the times.

Now, from a certain point of view, it might be entirely appropriate to the search of our time, but only on the surface, if one could read Spinoza's “Ethics” or Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” in front of the cinematograph. Why not? It would take into account the passive devotion that is so popular today. It is so loved that one cannot believe that the spiritual must have a reality into which one can only find one's way by taking every step with it. That one expresses in oneself, in one's spiritual soul, what the essence of things is, that our time does not yet love. Let us take a look at a billboard! Let us try to guess the thoughts of the people standing in front of it. Not many people will go to a lecture where there are no slides, but only reflections that the souls also create the thoughts that are put forward, as opposed to a lecture where spiritual and psychological matters are supposedly demonstrated in slides, where one only has to passively surrender.

Anyone who looks into the search of our time, where it asserts its deepest, still unconscious hopes and longings, knows that in the depths of the soul, the urge for activity still rests; the urge to find itself again as a soul in full activity. The human soul can only be free, with a secure inner hold, if it can develop inner activity. The human soul can only find its way and find its bearings in life by becoming conscious of itself, by realizing that it is not only that which is passively given to it by the world, but by knowing that it is present when it is able to experience in activity; and of the spiritual world it can only perceive that of which it is able to take possession in activity. In reflecting on what spiritual science offers, the process of comprehension must develop into active participation; but in this way spiritual science becomes a satisfaction of the deepest, subconscious impulses in the souls of the present, and in this way it meets the most intimate search of our time. For with regard to the things touched on here, our time is a time of transition. It is easy to say, even trivial, that we live in a time of transition, because every time is a time of transition. Therefore, it is always correct to say that we live in a time of transition. But if one emphasizes that one lives in a time of transition, it depends much more on what any given time is in transition from. If we now want to describe our time in its transition, we have to say: it was necessary - because only through this could the natural sciences and what has been achieved through them come about - that for centuries humanity went through an education towards passivity; because only in this way, through devotion to materialistic truths, could it be achieved what had to be achieved, especially in the field of natural science. But the fact is that life unfolds in rhythms. Just as a pendulum swings up and then swings down again, swinging to the opposite side, so too must the human soul, when it has been educated in a justifiable way for a period of time to be faithfully and passively devoted, pull itself together again in order to find itself again; in order to take hold of itself, it must pull itself together to become active. For what has it become through passivity? Well, what it has become through passivity, I will say it unashamedly with a radical-sounding sentence that will certainly sound much too paradoxical to many. But on the other hand, it is precisely the assimilation of spiritual science that shows, as it actually is only the fact, that one does not pull oneself together to face the consequences of the scientific world view if one does not emphasize this radical result. They lack the courage to draw the real consequences, even those who claim to stand solely and exclusively on the ground of what true science yields. If they had this consistency, then one would hear strange words murmured through the seeking of the time.

The Old Testament documents begin with words – I do not want to talk about their inner meaning today; everyone may take the words as they can take them; some may consider them to be an image, others an expression of a fact: everyone can agree on what I have to say about these words – the words are: “You shall be as God, knowing – or discerning – good and evil!” The words resound in our ears, from the beginning of the Old Testament. However you look at it, you have to admit that it expresses something momentous for human nature and the human soul. It is attributed to the tempter, who approaches man and whispers in his ear: “If you follow me, you will be like a god and distinguish good from evil.” It will be possible to surmise that the inclination not only towards good would not express itself in man without this temptation; that without this temptation the inclination would have arisen only towards good, so that all human freedom is in some way connected with what these words express. But they do express that man was, as it were, invited by the tempter to look beyond himself as a different being from what he is: to behave like a god towards good and evil. As I said, however you may think about these words and the tempter, I am certainly not demanding today that you immediately accept him as a real being – although it is quite true for those who see through things, the word: “The devil is never felt by the people, even when he has them by the collar.” But he who is able to eavesdrop a little on the search of the time, hears today in this search of the time his whispering again. It is drawing near. Call it a voice of the soul or whatever you will: there it is — it can be said without any superstition. And for those who have the courage to draw the final consequences of a purely scientific worldview, it brings forth words of great peculiarity, of a strange wisdom. It is just that the people who claim to be on the basis of pure science do not have the courage to draw the final conclusion. They do include in their feelings and thoughts the belief in a distinction between good and evil, which they would actually have to deny if they wanted to be purely on the basis of science. It is a fact that as soon as one places oneself on the ground of mere natural science, not only does the sun shine equally on good and evil, but according to the laws of nature, evil is performed from human nature just as much as good. And so he, the tempter, drawing the conclusion, whispers to man: Don't you see, you are just like highly developed animals. You are like animals and cannot distinguish between good and evil. — This is what makes our time a time of transition, that the tempter speaks to us again in our time with the opposite voice to that with which he spoke according to the Old Testament: You are only developed animals and so, if you understand yourselves, you cannot make any distinction between good and evil.

If one had the courage to be consistent, it would be the expression of a pure, passively surrendered worldview. That time be spared from this voice – let it be said merely figuratively – that knowledge of spiritual life be brought into the seeking of the time: that is the task, that is the goal of spiritual science. Those who still fight against this spiritual science today from the standpoint of some other science will have to realize that this fight is like the fight against Copernicanism. Now that we are also being noticed more in the world through the building of our School of Spiritual Science in Dornach, which used to ignore us, the voices of our opponents are growing louder. And when I recently objected in the writing: “What is spiritual science and how is it treated by its opponents” that the opponents of spiritual science today stand on the same point of view as the opponents of Copernicus, one who felt affected rightly said: Yes, the only difference would be that what Copernicus said are facts, while spiritual science only puts forward assertions. He does not realize, the poor man, that for people of his mind the facts of Copernicanism at that time were also nothing more than assertions, empty assertions, and he does not realize that today he calls empty assertions what, before real research, are facts, albeit facts of spiritual life. And so one can find objections raised by both the scientific and religious communities regarding this spiritual science. Just as people said at the time of Copernicus, “We cannot believe that the Earth revolves around the Sun, because it is not in the Bible,” so people today say, “We do not believe what spiritual science has to say, because it is not in the Bible.” But people will come to terms with what spiritual science has to say, as they came to terms with what Copernicus had to say.

And again and again we must remember a man who was both a deeply learned man and a priest, who worked at the local university and who, when he gave his rector's speech about Galileo, spoke the beautiful words: At that time, the people who believed that religious ideas were being shaken stood against Galileo; but today – as this scholar said at the beginning of his rectorate – today the truly religious person knows that every new truth that is researched adds a piece to the original revelation of the divine governance of the world and to the glory of the divine world order. Thus one would like to make the opponents of spiritual science aware of something that could well have been, even if it was not really so. Let us assume that someone had stepped forward before Columbus and said: We must not discover this new land, we live well in the old land, the sun shines so beautifully there. Do we know whether the sun also shines in the newly discovered land? So it is that those who believe their religious feelings disturbed by the discoveries of spiritual science appear to the spiritual scientist in the face of his religious ideas. He must have a shaky religious concept, a weak faith, who can believe that the sun of his religious feeling will not shine on every newly discovered country, even in the spiritual realm, just as the sun that shines on the old world also shines on the new world. And anyone who faces the facts impartially can be sure that this is so. But in its quest, when time becomes more and more imbued with spiritual science, it will be touched by it in a way that many today still cannot even dream of.

Spiritual science still has many opponents, understandably so. But in this spiritual science one does feel in harmony with all those spirits of humanity who, even if they have not yet had spiritual science, have sensed those connections of the human soul with the spiritual worlds that are revealed through spiritual science. In particular, with regard to what has been said about the new word of the tempter, one feels in harmony with Schöller and his foreboding of the spiritual world. Through his own scientific studies, Schiller has gained the impression that he has to lift man out of mere animality and that the human soul has a share in a spiritual world. On the soil of spiritual science, one feels in deep harmony with a leading spirit of the newer development of world-views when one can summarize, as in a feeling, what today wants to be expressed with broader sentences, with the words of Schiller:

Now the dull barrier of animality fell,
And humanity stepped onto the cloudless brow!
And the exalted stranger, the thought,
Leaped out of the amazed brain!

In confirmation that animality receded and that the human being belongs to a spiritual world, in confirmation of such sentences, spiritual science today stands before the quest of our time.

The expansion, the strengthening, the securing of this innermost essence, this spiritual inner essence of the soul, is to be offered to the search of the time through spiritual science.

Although it is difficult in a certain respect to deal with the fundamentals of spiritual science, as it is meant here, as it was done in the lecture the day before yesterday, it may well be said that the communications relating to those research results, which are to form the subject of today's lecture, are in a certain respect actually a risk in relation to the ways of imagining and thinking of the present age. For although one may have to find some paradoxes in the lecture of the day before yesterday from the point of view of these ways of thinking and habits of mind, from such a point of view one will certainly and understandably not find it easy to see serious research in what is to be said today. Rather, many people in the present day will be inclined to see it only as the ravings of a strange fantasist. One must be fully aware of this when speaking about these things; aware that everything that enters into general consciousness at a later time, much of what then later becomes a matter of course, is something paradoxical and fantastic in the time when it first appears.

I would just like to say this in advance to characterize how aware the spiritual researcher is of all the things that can understandably be felt when he allows himself to share his research results, which still seem paradoxical for today's time.

Before I come to these research results, I would like to characterize the basic mood of the spiritual researcher's soul in a few introductory words. This basic mood is quite different from the mood towards another field of research. While in our knowledge of the external world and also in our knowledge of ordinary science, we today have the feeling, with a certain amount of justification, that we have the powers of knowledge within us, that we only need to put them into effect, so to speak, and then we can judge everything that nature itself and the researcher discovers in nature. While in this research one devotes all one's efforts to the very purpose of research, to observe things and to recognize their laws through the intellect, the attitude of the spiritual researcher towards the truth, towards all striving for knowledge, is quite different. By working one's way into this spiritual research, one increasingly feels the need to devote all one's soul-work, all one's inner striving, to preparation; and more and more one gets the feeling that, when one wants to approach some truth in this or that field, one would actually like to keep waiting, keep preparing oneself further and further, because one is aware that The more effort and work one puts into the path of the soul that must be traveled before one can research, the more one matures and is ready to receive the truth. For it is the receiving of the truth that is the real subject of spiritual science. And this feeling, this mood, comes over the soul so strongly that one feels a holy awe at the approach of these things, and that one would rather wait again and again for important, essential insights of spiritual research than allow these things to enter into consciousness too soon. This requires a very special mood in the spiritual researcher himself, that mood which gradually permeates all the work, as was mentioned the day before yesterday as an inner soul work in exercises, and which brings about a certain attitude in the spiritual researcher towards the truth, precisely the attitude of holy awe towards the truth.

Having said this, I would now like to enter, without prejudice, into what will be said about the important, meaningful subject so close to every soul this evening. Certainly, there are not the worst minds in our present time that still hold on to the opinion that the truths of faith are special and the truths of knowledge are also special, and that everything that man can imagine as going beyond birth and death is only an object of faith, not of strictly provable science. It is precisely this strict separation between faith and knowledge that is abolished by spiritual science. And one feels in harmony with what has long wanted to enter into modern spiritual striving when the truths that lie beyond death are developed in the sense in which it is to be done here; one feels in harmony with it when one repeatedly bears in mind the fact that that the great Lessing did indeed deal with one of the main truths of this spiritual science, in the work that he wrote as his spiritual testament shortly before his death, the mature fruit of his thinking and meditating: his “Education of the Human Race”. Lessing does not shy away from saying that the belief in repeated lives on Earth does not necessarily have to be an error because it occurred, as it were, as something that the human race came up with before the prejudices of school and philosophers had yet cast something of a hazy veil over what humanity knew from the beyond of death at the beginning of its cultural development. In this way one feels in harmony with the best personalities who have integrated their striving into the cultural development of humanity, especially if one stands on the ground of this spiritual science.

It was said the day before yesterday that the things of spiritual life, the processes of the same, can only be researched when, through what was described the day before yesterday, the human being really comes to strengthen the forces slumbering in his soul so much that this soul finds the possibility - it was said comparatively: as the chemist extracts hydrogen from water — so the soul of the spiritual researcher finds the possibility, through soul exercises, to withdraw from the physical body and to experience itself separately from the physical body, so that it can then associate a meaning with the word: I experience myself as a spiritual being outside of my body, and my body, with everything that belongs to it in the sense world, stands before me as an external object stands before us when we look at it with our eyes or touch it with our hands. And already during the last time when I was allowed to give some public lectures here, I was able to draw attention to the significant moment that occurs in the life of the spiritual researcher when, through the exercises mentioned the day before yesterday, this spiritual researcher has truly matured. If you want to know more about these exercises, you can find it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' and in my 'Occult Science in Outline'. Here too, only the principle of what the spiritual researcher experiences is to be pointed out. When he has brought his soul to the point where it can emerge from its body, then one day, or one might also say one night, the experience comes; for both are possible: in the midst of the usual events of the day, in the midst of the night, and if properly prepared, neither will disturb it. It can occur in a hundred different ways, I would just like to describe the typical character. It can occur either way, it will always occur in a typical way, what I am now describing: It happens that the person wakes up as if from sleep; he knows: something is happening that is not a dream. He is removed from all external perception, all sorrows, all passions, all that connects him to the day. Or in the middle of the day the event occurs where one's imagination must stand still, where something completely different enters into the imagination, into consciousness. That which then enters can be like this — it will always be similar to how I describe it; I would like to describe as concretely as possible how this harrowing event can really happen for the spiritual researcher. One can have the feeling: You are now like in a house that has been struck by lightning. Your surroundings are disintegrating like a house that has been struck by lightning. The lightning goes right through you. You feel how everything to which you are materially connected is being separated from you as if by the elements, and you feel as if you are being detached from yourself, maintaining yourself as a spiritual being. It is the deepest, most harrowing impression imaginable. From that moment on, or from a similar one, one knows what it means to experience oneself in the soul, apart from one's body. And the spiritual researchers of all times have used an expression for this experience that seems fully appropriate to the one who knows this experience. For there has been a kind of spiritual research at all times, just as the different cultures required. Today's is different from those of earlier times; it is commensurate with the advances of modern science. But what is achieved through it has also been achieved through the methods that had been made possible by the different cultures. Thus, spiritual researchers of the most diverse times have described the experience just mentioned with the words: as a human being, one arrives at the gate of death. And indeed, what one can first imagine as being experienced through death actually occurs. It does not occur directly as a reality; for the spiritual researcher returns to his body and everything is as before; he perceives the external world again. But everything he experiences is a picture of what really happens when a person passes through the gate of death, when the outer, physical life ends and the life after death begins.

If we now wish to understand how the spiritual researcher comes to know the things that are mentioned here, we must bear in mind that, through the careful preparation of his soul, as has been mentioned, he attains a perception that is quite different from that of the outer senses; he can truly look into those spheres of existence that are to be discussed.

The first thing that the spiritual researcher comes to when he has overcome such a moment at the gateway of death, the first thing could be called in a sense: one reaches beyond human memory. Human memory, the human power of recollection, is indeed something that lives in our soul, as it were, as the beginning, one might say, of something spiritual. Even external philosophical researchers who know nothing of spiritual science can see this. The French researcher Bergson, who has achieved such brilliant successes, sees something purely spiritual in the memory of man that has nothing to do with biological or physiological processes. And when the prejudices of natural science, which still cling to almost everyone today, have passed, then people will realize that our memory contains something for the human soul that is, as it were, the beginning of a transition from what is bound to the senses and the brain to something purely spiritual and soul-like. When we push our perceptions back into our memory, we do not store them through any physical process, but purely in the soul. I can only hint at this. A scientific justification of what has just been said would take a great deal of time and require special lectures. Just as in ordinary life we perceive memory images that arise from the treasure trove of our soul, which, as they occur, have nothing that could lead us to mistake them for an illusion or hallucination, so now, not from the treasure of the soul, but from spiritual worlds, the spiritual processes and spiritual facts now arise before the soul of the spiritual researcher; and one then notices that behind what we call the treasure of memory, the human soul can experience something else. The spiritual researcher then sees, as it were, the following: Now you have been drawn out of your body with your soul; now you can really get an overview because it has become an external object, that which you have acquired through the sense world: the treasure of memory. But this treasure of memory is like a veil that covers something that always lives in the soul, only unconsciously; but what is covered by memory and remembrance is veiled. Yes, in the depths of the human soul there is something that is always alive in it; but when a person unfolds his memories in his soul, he covers up this subconscious spiritual-soul life. When the spiritual researcher rises into the spiritual-soul realm, one might say that his memories are attached to the comet's tail of his spiritual-soul nature. But through these memories he can see something that could be called: forces of a higher kind than those that are preserved for us by memory. If the expression were not so frowned upon – but it is difficult to find appropriate expressions for these areas that have nothing to do with the sensory world – one could use the expression: one ascends to a super-memory from memory. One gradually enters into what was imaginatively called imaginative imagining the day before yesterday. Whereas with memory one always has the feeling that the images of memory are rising and presenting themselves to the soul as you passively surrender to them, now you are immersed in what lies beyond memory and you know that you have to actively help bring forth what then arises as imagination, as the content of supermemory. But through the soul prepared for these things, one also knows that what reveals itself as lying behind memory is always there, that it was only covered by memory, and one knows, by recognizing it in its essence, that what descends into the depths that lie beneath the treasure trove of memory is itself something that is now working on our physical organism, that is active in it. A quite different discovery is made. The following discovery is being made, and it is of extraordinary significance for the relationship between spiritual research and natural science. Natural science presents itself to us today by saying: everything that a person feels, thinks and wills is bound to processes in his nervous system. It is right in saying this, but with its methods it cannot find out how the soul life is bound to the nervous system, or how thinking, for example, is bound to the brain. One has to go to much deeper foundations of the soul life. When one comes up with spiritual research, one realizes: Yes, it is quite correct for the ordinary conception of everyday life, and also for scientific work, that all the thoughts we form, and also all sensations, for example, are bound to the brain; but how are they bound to the brain? The deeper soul, of which ordinary consciousness knows nothing, which is only discovered through spiritual research, only works on, we say, a certain part of the brain, only sends its workers into the senses and brain; and through the fact that this “subconscious” soul works on the nervous system, the latter becomes a mirror to reflect what occurs in ordinary life. What occurs in ordinary life is the mirror image of the soul-spiritual. Just as if a mirror were placed here and you were to approach it, you would not see yourself but only your mirror image, so it is when you develop your everyday thinking, feeling and willing. The deeper soul works specifically on the nervous system and brain, and what it develops there makes it possible to perceive something. So it is the soul-spiritual that works on the eye, and what causes certain processes in the eye. When these processes are triggered, the eye reflects back into the spiritual-soul that which we call color. Thus it is the deeper soul-spiritual that works in the body. And spiritual research will lead humanity to this: to recognize that it is we ourselves who live in the interior of our conceptions, and that it is we ourselves, with our deeper being, who first prepare the body to become a mirroring apparatus for what the soul then experiences. This is how it is in ordinary, external, spatial life. But at the moment when our perceptions become images of memory, something else must happen; if we do not want our perceptions to flash past us like dreams before they become memory, we have to pay attention to them. Anything that is to become a memory, that is to remain with us in our soul, requires longer concentration than is necessary for mere perception, say. A color impression would not remain in our memory if we only looked at it for just as long as it takes to evoke the color. If we look at it longer, we appeal to that power that preserves all of this in our soul as a memory. We push back, as it were, our soul activity into a deeper being and this turns out not to be the physical body, but something finer, more ethereal than the physical body; and what in spiritual research with the term “ethereal,” which is frowned upon and not at all popular today. However, the word does not have the meaning usually associated with it. It presents itself as an ethereal body that is already of a spiritual nature.

But our soul does not only work by creating these images of memory; it works much more through its contact with the outside world in the life between birth and death. And that is where the spiritual researcher discovers the remarkable fact that our memories only remain images because they are stopped by the etheric body and not allowed into the physical body. If they were to flow into the physical body, they would become activity in it, these ideas, so they would merge into the formative forces, into the living forces of the physical body, would organize it thoroughly. The fact that we let our ideas be ideas, that we do not let them merge into organic forces, means that they retain the character of memory, we preserve them in their imaginative power. They can remain memories.

But the soul also develops much stronger forces in life than those that develop the memories, and these stronger forces are now also initially stored in the soul. But they lie like an over-memory behind the ordinary store of memory; they are within us. This is what the spiritual researcher experiences when he looks through memory at this super-memory treasure, that he knows: something lives in your soul that cannot have an effect on your physical body, that lies below the surface of memory, but also does not come into effect in your physical body, now, as it is between birth and death. There is something that does not remain a mere idea, but which does not become an organically active force either. The spiritual researcher experiences this by being outside of his body. But at the same time he experiences something else, which he can express when he has become clear about the fact, by saying: Yes, I experience something in my soul, which is in it, which so to speak has no application because it cannot enter the body, which is formed since birth or, let us say, conception, because it finds no accommodation in it. And now, by delving into this, which I have indicated here, the spiritual researcher experiences it in such a way that he can recognize it, as one recognizes the germ that is in a plant. The plant develops from the root to the fruit, in which the germ is. But the germ is already inherent in the whole plant. That, which is the germ, has no meaning for this plant; it cannot sink its powers into this plant; but it is in it, it is the disposition for a following plant, let us say, of the next year. When the spiritual researcher delves down, he delves into something that is a soul core, a soul germ, in him, which he knows is formed in this life between birth and death, but it does not develop its powers not in this life; he dives into the deeper layers of the soul and lies ready for a following life, as in the fruit of a plant the germ lies ready for the following plant, which could not develop without the preceding one.

In this way one comes to an understanding of the harmony of successive human lives on earth with all of nature, if one knows how to dive into the soul. The important thing is that the spiritual researcher never loses sight of the fact that what you are experiencing can only be such that you become aware of your own activity again and again; because if you are not aware of it, you do not understand how it came about, then it becomes an illusion, a hallucination or mere fantasy. It is a complete fallacy to object: Yes, how can the spiritual researcher know that what he discovers is not a hallucination, an illusion, or fantasy? It could be a hallucination that one has suggested to oneself. If the spiritual researcher would place himself in relation to what he experiences as it has been described, as the morbid mind places itself in relation to a hallucination, then this objection would be fully justified. For it presents itself in the mind like an external perception, one does not see through it. But the spiritual researcher gets to know exactly through the right preparations - as you can read in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?” - that he can distinguish what is only reminiscence of the outside world, and what is imagination and hallucination , to which he remains passive, that he must distinguish this from what presents itself in such a way that he recognizes it in the same way as one is aware of a letter or a word: that which is written on the paper does not mean itself, but something else. For the spiritual researcher does not use what he has seen as one uses hallucinations, but in such a way that one can compare it with a spiritual reading in a writing of imaginations that present themselves. Only when one learns to use in one's mind, in a free way, what one presents there through one's own activity, in such a way that one lives in it as one lives in the writing, through which one sees through to what what they mean; only by rising in such an inwardly strengthened way to that which enters into the vision of the soul can one attain to truly seeing what processes and entities of the spiritual world are. But then, because one gradually becomes familiar with the element of our soul that is not the same as the body, one comes to understand the being of which one can say that the quality of immortality applies to it.

Spiritual science is not a speculative philosophy in which one reflects on the reasons that may arise for the immortality of the soul: spiritual science shows how to arrive at the soul itself and, from this true soul, it shows what it really is. It lays bare, as it were, the soul; and then it turns out that what is laid bare as the soul is not a product of the external body, but that this body is the result of what is discovered there. For when, on the one hand, one discovers within oneself the core of the soul, one senses and experiences that it is the germ of a next earthly life, then one also experiences in this content of consciousness, which lies above the store of memory, what has been drawn into the human being as the human physical body before he began his existence as a physical being at birth or, let us say, at conception. Just as the soul itself spatially prepares its brain when we perceive, so that it reflects its content, so one experiences that the spiritual-soul that one has reached before birth, before was present in a spiritual world and acquired the powers in this world to unite with the physical substance given by father and mother, to permeate this substantiality, to organize itself with it. We experience that the human being, as he enters the world, is not merely the product of father and mother, but that the spiritual unites with the material, with that which is given by father and mother; the spiritual that comes down from spiritual worlds, where it has lived between the last death and this conception. And by getting to know that in the soul which lies beyond memory, the spiritual researcher can also learn to recognize how the soul behaves when the physical, so to speak, no longer holds back the activity of this spiritual-soul, when death has come upon the person. When death has overtaken a person, the soul initially lives – this is the fact that presents itself to spiritual research – in that which has not become physical during life; it lives in its store of memories. In the first period after death, a wide range of memories unfolds before the soul of everything the person has experienced between birth and death. Even all those events come up that have been forgotten during life. This experiencing of all the memories lasts only a few days. The spiritual researcher can see through what is occurring as the first experience after death, because he is, after all, getting to know the nature of memory. When the soul has left the body, the content of consciousness for the spiritual researcher is really something like what it is for the dead person when he has passed through the gate of death. As soon as he is out of the body, the spiritual researcher also experiences everything that his entire thought content is, but now as a world; just as one usually has mountains and clouds and stars and sun and moon and rivers and cities around oneself, so out of the body one has a tableau of what one has experienced; only one can see through this tableau, one can see its effect. By getting used to, to use a trivial expression, really seeing through these things outside the body, one also gradually comes to be able to consciously cast one's gaze on what the soul experiences after death, what it has experienced after the last death, what it faces after the death that will come. At first it is this memory picture that spreads, the thoughts that have accumulated. But behind it, another soul power appears. Now that death has passed, this soul power is no longer inhibited by the body; now it works in such a way that this memory picture disappears from the person's surroundings after a few days.

As I said at the beginning, one comes to daring things when one wants to talk about the subject of today's lecture, but one cannot avoid touching on these things if one does not want to indulge in generalities. I have tried to explain what spiritual research has revealed about the duration of this first experience after death. It has been found that this review of the thought images of the experiences of the last life takes a different amount of time for different people: longer for one person and shorter for another. But in general, it lasts about as long as the strength can last during life, through which the person can stay awake when he is prevented from falling asleep. One person can hardly keep himself awake for one night without being overcome by sleep, while another can for many nights. This inner strength to fight sleep is the measure for the number of days that this remembering back lasts after death. Then it disappears and something else occurs.

What now occurs can only be absorbed if one already knows it through out-of-body experiences; but it is very difficult to find words for these experiences of the soul, which are very different from those experienced in everyday life. Our language is, after all, shaped for the sensual world. What lies outside the sensual world, the soul experiences quite differently than here in the sensual world. Therefore, I ask you to excuse me if some expressions seem awkward or paradoxical to you; but you can be assured that when someone sets out to describe with the very ordinary words of language that for which words are difficult to find, he will not be able to describe directly from the experiences of the soul that which is experienced after the return. What the soul experiences now, what the spiritual researcher experiences outside the body, is what I would like to give the term to, because it is neither feeling nor willing, it is something between feeling and willing. In ordinary life, one does not have this soul power, which one develops inwardly. One recognizes it as a spiritual researcher. It is as if the will moves with us in the world; and as if this will, I would like to say, by moving, carries on its wings or its tides what now comes to us as a feeling in such a way that it is as if it is outside of us, as if it plays on the waves of the will. While we are otherwise accustomed to feeling this feeling as something that is inwardly grown with us, now it becomes like surging and weaving on the waves of the will; and yet we know that in this experience we into the world, that what is out there as willing feeling, as feeling willing, what is out there as the color and tone perceptions of the sense world, is permeated by our being. There is feeling out there that we perceive as light; but at the same time we know we are connected with it.

But in the first period after the review, the person experiences this in such a way that the only world he perceives at first is basically the one from which he emerged, so to speak, at death. After the memory tableau has dawned, this feeling-wanting, wanting-feeling unfolds in the soul; but it expresses only things that are still connected with the last life on earth, so that we can characterize these things that we experience there in something like the following way: Earth life never gives man all that it could give him in his experience. A lot of things remain so that we can say: We have not enjoyed everything that could have been enjoyed, that could have made impressions between birth and death. There is always something left between the lines of life, so to speak, of desires, of wishes, of love for other people and so on. Unfinished business – to use the trivial expression – in the last life, that is what we look back on spiritually with desire, and now we look back spiritually with desire for years. During these years it is so that we have our world mainly in what we have been, so to speak. We look into our last existence on earth and see what remains undone. And only by living in a sphere for years in which nothing can be satisfied as it is satisfied on earth, because we have indeed discarded the bodily organs for it, do we work our way out of such connections with the last life on earth in the soul.

Here too, spiritual science has to survey the length of these experiences, and the following can be said: the time a person lives through in the earliest childhood up to the point where he remembers back, has no influence on the duration of the experiences that have now been described. Likewise, the time that we continue to live through after the age of twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven has no influence. The years from about the age of four into the twenties also indicate the length of time in which one – so connected with one's last life on earth – has to gain experiences in the spiritual world, to withdraw from earthly life. Spiritual observation shows that the time taken to build up the body with the upward striving forces after the previous spiritual life, after going through conception and birth, lasts until the mid-twenties, and that the time taken long it took to imbue life with the physical, organic-fertile forces, to imbue it with the forces that desire and enjoy in life, it takes about the same amount of time to find one's way out of the last earthly life. So that if you turn twelve years old, for example, you may only need five years to emerge from your last life on earth, or seven years; but if you turn fifty, for example, the years after the mid-twenties no longer contribute anything special to the extension of the period just mentioned.

It must be said of this period that it already contains to a certain extent what can be called: the human being perceives spiritual processes and spiritual beings in his environment. I already indicated the day before yesterday that when the spiritual researcher experiences himself in his spiritual and mental self, he is in a real spiritual world. The dead person moves into this spiritual world; but at first he is so busy with his connections with his previous world, in the way we discussed before, that he can only gain a connection with what is in his spiritual surroundings by taking a detour through his earlier life. To give an example: let us assume that someone has passed through the gate of death. The retrospective view is over. He is living in this time of tearing himself away from the contexts of his previous life on earth. Someone he has loved is still in the physical body. The one who is still in this stage of experience, of which we are just speaking, cannot look directly at the soul that is still on earth; but a kind of switchover is formed, as it were: in the last life on earth, we loved the person who has remained behind; we look at the feeling of love when we are in the stage that we are now discussing. Feelings are our outside world. By looking at them, we find the way to the soul that is still on earth. Likewise, we must also find the way to a soul that has already passed through the gate of death through feeling. So one can say: a person lives with human souls as a soul after death, but initially in a roundabout way through his own life.

But more and more a power develops in man, a soul power, which only the spiritual researcher knows when he experiences himself spiritually and soul-wise outside of the body. There is no expression for this. For the other power one can at least say: 'Volitional feeling' or 'feeling volition', because it has something in common with volition and feeling. Even when volition and feeling have become objectified, they still have something in common with the impulses of feeling and will that we otherwise have in life with the things that surge around in volitions and feelings out there. But what the soul now experiences, what awakens in it as a power, the more it moves away in the manner described from the last life on earth, I can only describe with an expression that may sound clumsy in relation to ordinary language, but which is nevertheless indicative. I can only call it: creative soul power, soul creativity. It is something that the soul experiences directly now. That one is absorbed in an activity is something the soul experiences completely; but at the same time, that this creative power really develops, really radiates from the soul into the environment and - again it is clumsy, but it has to be used to make oneself understood, this expression - this power is something that radiates into the environment like a spiritual light, illuminating the spiritual processes and beings all around, so that we see them; just as when the sun rises, we see external objects through the sun, we see spiritual processes and beings through our own inner luminosity, which is poured out. Now the time is approaching when the soul is in the spiritual environment to the extent that this creative power awakens in her to illuminate this world. And here the religions have not used an insignificant expression when they say, to describe life after death: This feeling of being in the creative power, this living in a spiritual environment, which becomes visible when one sends one's own creative power into it, this experiencing of oneself in the outpouring of light is a feeling of bliss. Even the pains are experienced as bliss in this world. There the soul now experiences its further life.

Now it is a matter of the soul only being able to go through this experience in alternating states, which has just been described. I do, however, enter spheres that to the ordinary person are pure fantasy. But according to the preparatory instructions that have now been given, I am also allowed to discuss these things, for it must be clear that the spiritual researcher will never claim anything other than that such things can only be revealed to him when he experiences out of the body. So the soul experiences alternating conditions. It is not always in a state in which it radiates its spiritual luminosity emotionally over its surroundings, so that human souls and other entities are now around it and spiritual processes are experienced by it. It is not always the case that the soul therefore lives in the external spiritual world, but this state must alternate with the state in which the soul feels that this radiance of spiritual luminosity is, as it were, being dampened. The soul becomes inwardly dull, it can no longer radiate its light into the surroundings, it must withdraw into itself. And now comes the moment when, in the meantime between death and a new birth, the soul lives a completely lonely life. This lasts a long time. If you want to compare it to ordinary life, you can say: just as in ordinary life a person has to alternate between sleeping and waking, after death he has to alternate between a life that pours out into the outer world and a life of inner solitude. When everything that was previously experienced in the state of expansion has been taken in, but when the soul knows: you are now completely alone with yourself. Just as one becomes unconscious during sleep, here one withdraws into oneself, but does not become unconscious. The soul experiences a strengthened consciousness precisely in these times of loneliness, but it experiences it in such a way that it knows: out there is the spiritual world, but you are alone with yourself, everything you experience, you experience within yourself. What you experience within yourself are the echoes of what you have experienced outside of yourself. Only through this can the inner luminosity grow stronger again and emerge from the soul once more. And then you wake up spiritually again and experience the other state.

It is one of the most remarkable experiences to really learn to associate a meaning with the words that for the time between death and a new birth the soul lives in spiritual companionship and loneliness, that for this alternation of social experiences and loneliness in the spiritual world, although through much longer periods than day and night, that for this after-death experience it means something similar to sleeping and waking for the physical experience. I have indicated these conditions in my penultimate book: 'The Threshold of the Spiritual World'. But the soul experiences so, by continuing to live between death and a new birth, gradually a down-dumping, a dimming of their luminous power. One would like to say: the experiences of inner loneliness are becoming stronger and stronger. They gradually become so that the person experiences a whole world within, one might say a whole cosmos. Truly, it becomes so that one is justified in saying: the person is overcome by something like a feeling of fear of himself when he discovers what is all down there in the depths of the soul, and what now comes out in the middle of life between death and a new birth.

And then the time comes that I tried to depict in my fourth mystery drama: 'The Awakening of the Soul'. I tried to show this time when a person can only have inner experiences; when the nights of loneliness become longer and longer; when a person can no longer awaken spiritually to a consciousness in which he radiates his luminosity all around. I have tried to express what the person experiences then with a symbolic expression, with the expression: the midnight of spiritual existence between death and a new birth. It is the time when a person experiences everything in the depths of his soul as his world, when he only knows: beyond the shores of your soul are the spiritual worlds, where everything that exists of spiritual beings is, where all human souls are, disembodied or embodied, and where all other beings are; but one only knows it because one has the echoes of it within oneself. And now something arises in the soul that again cannot be described with an ordinary word. Isn't it true that ordinary language has the word 'longing' for the most passive state in the soul. When we are longing in physical experience, we are at our most passive. We long for something, we desire something we do not have – and longing certainly cannot bring about what we long for. We can only behave passively. But the soul forces take on a completely different character when the soul is outside the body. From the depths of loneliness, from what the soul experiences in the manner described in the world midnight of the spirit, the longing arises to live again into the world from which one has been torn in one's loneliness. And now this longing becomes active, and out of it arises something spiritually real, an organizing power. It really becomes a new power of perception. This spiritual longing gives birth to a new soul power, again a power that can now perceive an external world, but a world that is both external and internal: external because it really is outside our being; internal because we look at it as the world we lived through in the previous life, the world of our previous incarnation on earth. This now becomes our outside world through our longing. We look at everything that remained unfinished in the previous life, and our longing builds up forces within us to create balance for what the soul has done in the previous earthly life that was bad, foolish, evil, ugly, in order to create balance for it in a new life.

This is the time when every person can look back on his previous earthly lives, the time when, between death and a new birth, a person is confronted – confronted in his mind – with all the deeds of his previous lives, and the tendency awakens in him to make amends in a new earthly life, to live out the new earthly experiences and make good what was experienced in previous earthly lives. I have met people who said that one life was enough for them; I even met someone who was on the verge of finding something sensible in these repeated lives on earth. But then he wrote me a card from the nearest railway station saying that he didn't want to know about the next life on earth. But the important thing is not that we can form an idea of these repeated lives on earth, but that every soul is able to look back on its previous lives on earth and at the same time absorb the tendency to experience a new life on earth that will make up for its previous ones. And one also experiences that there are people to whom one owes something, or who owe something to one: this appears before the soul as a supplement to one's own life on earth. And the tendency arises to live together again with those people to whom one owes something, in order to make up for what one owes. And the same tendency arises in other people. As a result, forces arise in different people who used to live at the same time; spiritual forces are aroused that tend down to earth. This is why such people, who had been together earlier, come together in the new earth life. What these souls have remained indebted to each other must be settled. As I said, the tendencies come together there. And then one experiences this spiritual life between death and a new birth over and over again: more and more the tendencies I spoke of become apparent and take hold. They become living tendencies. And from what he has experienced in past lives, the person creates the archetype, the spiritual archetype of the new life on earth.

He now creates this himself as time moves on; he now creates what connects with the material substance given by father and mother to enter a new life on earth. And depending on the inherited qualities of the father and mother in the material substance and how closely they are related to the spiritual archetype, the spiritual archetype is drawn to the material substance before conception. So that one can say: the elective affinity between the inherited qualities and the archetype, which decides to which parental couple the soul is magnetically drawn, in which life one finds oneself. In this way the person returns to earth again, unites again with an earthly body. And spiritual research can now see what develops in the child, one might say, in such a mysterious way – anyone who knows how to observe a child's life will see it is so – by the gradual appearance of expressive features from within, by the skillful movements developing from the clumsy ones develop from the clumsy ones, and in that what so visibly works from within models and plasticizes the body; in all this the spiritual researcher sees that which has gone through the experiences between death and a new birth, as we have been talking about, and how it connects more and more with the body – that is what the spiritual researcher sees. Now he understands why initially no memories of these experiences before birth can be present: The forces that could become powers of memory are used up to organize the body. The child would remember everything from before, because it has these powers; but the powers are transformed; just as the pressure forces that I develop when I run my finger over the table are transformed into warmth, so these powers of memory are transformed into organizing forces. What the child organizes internally, what makes the brain plastic so that the child can think later, that it can develop memory powers in the physical body: that is transformed, retrospective power; it disappears in this form, in which it can develop the retrospective view, and organizes the body. And the spiritual that organizes the body is the soul that has been transformed and flows into the body. And so we understand the life we are currently living by understanding what happened outside of life beyond death. What is at work in a person in earthly life has appropriated his powers between death and a new birth. The forces that come to light in a purely spiritual way are the powers of memory, which have been transformed, flowing into the body and organizing it through and through.

Natural scientists will one day discover how the forces that lie purely in heredity are also depleted in the human being at the time when the ability to inherit arises. Certain lower animals die at the same time as they mature for the birth of another being; what powers the human being must develop in order to have physical offspring and to pass something on to them must be concluded by the time they reach sexual maturity; I can only hint at this. Natural science and spiritual science together will be able to provide important insights into this. But in all that works as physical forces in man, spiritual forces are at work. It is the spiritual forces that are active in the physical body in such a way that they permeate this physical body. The physical body is, as it were, the reflection of the spiritual. And basically, it is actually destructive processes that bring about the aforementioned reflection. It is always destructive processes when we see colors, when we hear sounds; even when we form memories, we undergo destructive processes within us. This is the reason for the necessity of sleep, so that the human being does not allow the destructive processes to work alone.

Thus we live, permeating and empowering our body with the forces we acquire outside of the body, and life can only be understood if we consider the spiritual and mental aspects at work in it. Spiritual science is not as fortunate as other sciences in that it can speak of death in plants and animals in the same way as it does in humans. What I have said now applies only to man. In this way spiritual research broadens our view beyond what lies between birth and death. Yes, spiritual research even explains details. I can well imagine that those of you who have a little time for these results of spiritual research would like to hear more details, but I can only give a few examples.

First of all, an example is given that may seem particularly mysterious to the spiritual researcher himself, despite the fact that it sounds paradoxical. This is the existence of criminal natures. It is not true that spiritual research is not at all of the opinion that criminals deserve only compassion and should not be punished. It is not the business of the spiritual researcher to interfere in the external affairs of the world; but to understand what meets us in human life is what the spiritual researcher wants, and he wants it from the depths of the spiritual world. So we ask ourselves: What about a life that manifests itself as criminal? Well, things are easily said, but the answers to such questions must first be wrung from the spiritual researcher, and he must also, in fact, force himself to speak about these things because they seem so utterly paradoxical to the present-day way of thinking. When the criminal is examined, by means of clairvoyance, it turns out that criminal natures are a kind of spiritual premature birth. There is a possibility for every soul to descend from the spiritual worlds and to connect with physical materiality, which is, so to speak, the normal one; but the tendencies that lead to this normal one intersect with other tendencies, so that most people – but criminals especially – descend into earthly life much earlier than would normally be the case. This turns out to be strange. Now that has something else in its wake. To really penetrate with the whole body, to stand in the physicality of the earth as a complete human being, that is only possible if one reincarnates at least approximately at the normal time. But if there are reasons to come down earlier due to previous earthly lives, then one takes something with one that lives in the subconscious, of which one is not at all aware. There is something living in the depths of the soul that makes one take life too lightly, because one did not come down at the time when one could have connected most perfectly with the physical. So one connects only superficially. But one knows nothing about it. It becomes an inner mood of the soul; not to take life fully. And so it may be that in his ordinary consciousness he even has an abnormally developed sense of self-preservation, so that he faces the social world with hostility, develops the strongest egoism, so that he becomes a criminal – and yet in his inner nature, which he does not know, there is a certain superficiality, a carelessness about life, he does not want to place any value on this life. This is caused by a spiritual premature birth. If that is the case, then this life also comes into existence in such a way that the person can fuel the ever-present instinct for self-preservation through what he does not know, which is a taking life lightly, and you see that sprout in the souls of criminals. Only when I knew that this was the case did another thing become clear to me. There is a dictionary of crook language. One can only understand the peculiar nature of the language of crime, this taking of life lightly in the words that come from the subconscious of the soul, when one knows what has been indicated above. But it must be pointed out again and again that in the totality of human lives on earth, what one life breaks is balanced again, so that the criminal, precisely through what he has to experience as a result of his crimes, ascends to other lives on earth in which a balance occurs.

But other things also become understandable when we look at the mysteries of life with spiritual research. We see people who are taken away by misfortune for my sake. Strangely enough, it turns out that when people are killed by an accident at a time when they would not otherwise have left the earth, that is, at a time when the earthly-physical forces are still present; for example, if someone is run over by a locomotive in the thirty-fifth year of their life without seeking death, then the forces in his body that could still have been effective are still present. When one departs from the physical world, these powers do not vanish into nothingness, but one sees how the soul-spiritual, the powers of intelligence, the powers of exact thinking can be strengthened by such an accident, so that such a person can be reborn with stronger powers of intelligence than another who dies a natural death. One must realize that spiritual research, in that it surveys life from a broad horizon, must speak differently about many things than one speaks in ordinary life. Someone who dies at an early stage of life, let us say, through an illness, who undergoes much through this illness, prepares his soul through this illness in such a way that his powers of will can be strengthened. Dying young from illness strengthens the willpower.

Yes, some of it may seem like pure fantasy; but I am also aware – I may as well admit it – that I have a certain responsibility when I discuss these things, and that I would not discuss them if I did not know the means of spiritual research with which these things can be known with the same certainty as the things of the external world can be known. I would consider it the greatest frivolity if these things were said without a knowledge lying in the soul that is imbued with such a mood as has just been indicated.

Thus man's life becomes understandable precisely through that which lies outside the physical life; and as life develops between birth and death, so it is a result of the life that lies beyond birth and death. To some this may appear to be a devaluation of life. So that it does not appear so to the honored listeners, I would like to repeat something very briefly. Someone may say: We are being made aware that what we experience in an earthly life, we have prepared for ourselves. It is true. But if we experience misfortune, we experience it because we have previously implanted the tendency of our soul to enter into this misfortune. Just as the Alpine plant does not thrive in the lowlands but seeks the heights, so the human soul seeks out the situation in which misfortune can befall it; it grows into what it experiences as fate. Just as it is a matter of course for the plant to live in the Alps, so it is a matter of course for the human soul to plunge into misfortune when it absorbs the tendency through insight: only if you overcome this misfortune can you become more perfect in a relationship where you would have to remain more imperfect if misfortune did not happen to you. If someone says: so we are made the smiths of our own misfortune; and if it is said that we should not only bear and endure our misfortune, but in a certain way have even earned it supernaturally: This cannot be a consolation for us! – so, on the other hand, it must be said what I already made clear earlier by means of a comparison: if someone has lived up to the age of eighteen in abundance, without learning anything, out of his father's pocket, and his father then goes bankrupt, then, seen from the outside, it can be a great misfortune when life now lets him down. And he is right to find life unhappy now. But let us assume that he has reached the age of fifty and looks at his life from a different point of view: “If I had not been struck by misfortune, I would not have become what I am now.” For my father it was misfortune, for me it was a developmental catalyst for my life. Thus we are not always in a position to find the right point of view for an accident at the time we experience it. Before birth, we stand on a completely different point of view than afterwards: on the one that what has happened earlier must be experienced in a new life, which creates a balance for what has happened earlier. There we prepare the misfortunes that we later justly endure with suffering ourselves, and which we justly lament because we then consider them only from the point of view of physical-earthly experience.

I would still like to say a little about the time that passes between death and a new birth. The short time of hindsight after death, which only lasts for days, I have already indicated; the time that comes afterwards lasts longer, it lasts for decades. The spiritual researcher comes to it in the following way, how long this time lasts. He must first ask himself, so that he can develop the powers within himself to see something like this: What is it in your soul that, when you experience yourself outside the body, appears to you as something that can be carried by the soul through death? And strangely enough, one experiences that one takes something out of the body, while otherwise one leaves everything behind. As a spiritual researcher, you leave your passions, memories and so on behind when you leave your body; but you take with you your conquests, you take with you what you can only acquire in an earthly life, say, after the age of twenty. People today don't like to hear this, because today people are considered mature even before the age of twenty. You can see that in the newspapers, above and below the line, many people today have not reached the age of twenty. But the truth is that what one experiences through oneself, so that it really becomes accumulated wisdom, happens through having already experienced something and looking back on the earlier experience with a later one. This inward ascent through its conquests, this inward experience of the soul, is what already germinates – so it turns out – what the soul then experiences between death and a new birth. And so the soul must live in a continuous process of such conquests, of transforming its powers. Normally the soul remains in the spiritual world between death and a new birth as long as it has something to transform. From the other side, the following can be said: We live in a certain time; we absorb this or that, experience this or that by belonging to this or that tribe. Having gone through death, we have formed our life experiences from this. But the earth is changing. Not only are the physical conditions changing. Let the honored listeners think back to the time around the founding of Christianity when the areas here, where Vienna now lies, have changed. But in even shorter periods of time, the cultural face of the earth, the spiritual content of our surroundings, from which we draw our memory, our store of memories, is changing. Now the soul does not normally return to a new life on earth until it can enter a completely new spiritual environment. It turns out that the soul is not reborn without reason, but so that it can experience new things. To do that, it has to change everything it experienced in the previous life, for example, the ability to express itself in a particular language. This must be transformed; it must acquire another language ability. So that is the time. It usually lasts from one to one and a half millennia. But as I said, spiritual premature births can occur due to certain circumstances.

Time is pressing; I cannot go into the description of the special circumstances any further. I would just like to say this: that those of the esteemed listeners who might go home with the feeling, 'Yes, none of this is really credible; how can a person possibly know about this!' — may be mindful of what I mentioned at the beginning, that in fact later self-evident truths — insights that have penetrated into all souls — first communicated themselves to earthly culture as paradoxical. And anyone who wants to cultivate spiritual science today must already familiarize themselves with how understandable it is that what is so certain to become established in the minds of people as the Copernican world view has done, after it was first regarded as fantasy, even as something harmful, by many. But once more I may draw attention to the picture that presents itself to the spiritual researcher and to the one who is able to understand spiritual science in the sense mentioned the day before yesterday, in order to give him the strong awareness of the truth that will gradually assert itself. Even if it has to force its way through the narrowest crevices, so that it is pressed down by the heaviest masses of prejudice, it will still force its way through. This consciousness is strengthened when we look at Giordano Bruno; here we have a picture of someone who, by saying: ” People believed that when they looked up into the vast space above, the blue vault of heaven spread out; the sun and planets orbited it, and the blue vault of heaven is a wall, a blue wall! At that time Giordano Bruno could say: This wall only appears to you because your perceptive faculty only reaches up to it. You build this boundary yourselves; it is not there at all. Infinities of space spread out. And infinities of space are filled with infinite worlds.

Today, the spiritual researcher must consider this expansion of the human gaze into the infinities of space; he must consider how Giordano Bruno first pointed out that the boundaries of space in the vault of heaven are only created by the limitations of human perception itself; he must point out that there is also such a firmament for the time of human experience. By surveying human life with the physical organs of perception and the mind, one sees these limits, the limits of birth and death, as one once saw the limit of space in the blue vault of heaven, but which in reality does not exist. So too the limit of the time of human experience between birth, or let us say conception and death, is only posited by the limitedness of the human faculty of perception. And beyond birth or conception and death, temporal infinity expands, and embedded in this temporal infinity are the backward and forward repetitions of human life on earth and those lives that flow between death and a new birth. I cannot, however, go into detail about the fact that all these repetitions once had a beginning, that man was born out of the spiritual and found his dwelling place here – at that time the earth itself arose out of the spiritual world – and that man, after he has gone through the earthly repetitions, when the earth itself detaches itself from human souls, then man passes over into another, again spiritualized life. This can only be hinted at here; more exact details will be found in my Secret Science.

Even if the insights of spiritual science are in contradiction to the thinking of the present time in the way indicated, it must still be said that in the intuitions of those who were the leaders of humanity - I closed the same reflection the day before yesterday - one nevertheless finds what is being revived in spiritual science today. Spiritual science, as it is meant here, has not been had by men; for it is a child of our time, and will arise out of the education of our time; but those who knew themselves united in soul with the spirit of the universe, which surges and weaves in all men, they shaped the words into that to which spiritual science can say 'Yes' in the full sense. Spiritual science shows us how to understand life between birth and death by showing us that in this physical body, in all of physical life, what is immortal, what can also live in a spiritual world, is at work and weaving. Spiritual science shows us that we have life in the body through the life outside the body, so that no one can understand the life between birth and death who does not understand the life outside the body, in the spiritual firmament. Goethe expresses this with the words – intuitively sensing the later insights of spiritual science – with words that not only clearly state Goethe's belief in an immortal life, but also express how he knew that the real value in realization of present life, in the experience of earthly existence, depends on one's glowing through, illuminating through, permeating through this earthly existence with knowledge of that which is extrinsic, supernal, and immortal. Therefore, it is precisely this realization of spiritual science, that a true inner essence of the mortal is recognized by the immortal, as summarized in a feeling in the words in which Goethe once expressed his conviction: “To those who, out of the peculiar essence of their present life, do not want to form an opinion about another life, to them I would like to say with Goethe: ‘I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ’I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ‘I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: ’I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing in a future continuation; yes, I would like to say with Lorenzo de Medici: 'I would not want to miss out on the happiness of believing present life, to those I would say with Goethe: “I would not for the world renounce the good fortune of believing in a future life; nay, I would say with Lorenzo de' Medici that all those are dead even to this life who have no hope of another.”

Before I come to the lecture itself today, I would like to address a few words to you, which are only intended to say that this year, unfortunately, unlike in previous years, we will not be holding the events that would otherwise have taken place in Munich in the middle of summer, because the next such event is to take place in the Johannesbau and this building is taking a little longer than originally thought. It is to be hoped that in the last two months of this year we shall have made sufficient progress for the Johannesbau to be opened with appropriate ceremonies.

This construction project is, of course, giving us more work than one would usually imagine, and you will therefore understand that personal meetings have had to be canceled for a certain period of time.

For our dear Austrian friends, it has certainly not been easy in many respects to come to terms with the idea that the Johannesbau is so far away. However, although I am not in a position to discuss it further, because there is not enough time, the fact is that karma led us to build the Johannesbau where it is being built; and that will be good.

We must realize that we see this building as a kind of central place and symbol of our spiritual movement. What is far for one person is near for another; there was no way around that from the outset. But it is to be hoped that our Austrian friends will also find ways and means to experience this emblem of our anthroposophical movement as their own, I would like to say explicitly, by being personally present at the appropriate event of the Johannesbau. In reality, it is not only a symbol because of what it will become as a monumental building, but it is, in a sense, a symbol because, if it really comes about, it can only come about through the great willingness to make sacrifices on the part of some of our friends, who have really shown the utmost willingness to make sacrifices in order to complete the difficult and, above all, costly construction, as it is now to be.

What is to be created should actually express in every respect what our spiritual movement will be. And the whole architectural style must correspond to this. Everything that flows into the building must be such that it does not enter in a symbolic or allegorical way, but must flow into this building in a truly artistic way. Above all, it was necessary to build a structure that is an embodiment of the spiritual essence to which we are devoted in all its forms. The different periods and cultures of human development also had their own corresponding buildings. The building to be erected in Dornach should show in all its forms, from which it is composed and with which it is to form a shell for our spiritual work, through the way this shell opens outwards and inwards and closes and joins together, that something is expressed in its forms that has never before been conceived in architecture for such a building.

Just as the Greek temple stands as a dwelling for the god within, just as the Gothic cathedral stands to form a whole together with the community gathered within, so our building should be designed in such a way that the forms directly, I would say in a spiritual, intellectual relationship, shape the building so that it is spiritually transparent. That means that when you are inside the building, you will have the feeling, through the architecture and through that which passes from the architecture into the sculpture, that these walls are not like other architectural walls that have existed up to now, closed, merely enclosing, but that they are at the same time the communicators that open up spiritual life into infinite spiritual expanses. These are walls that simultaneously transcend themselves through their forms, that at the same time are not present in their physical form. The aim is for everyone who is inside and gradually gets used to these forms, not allegorically and symbolically, but in a living sensation, to have something like a view of the world we are talking about, simply by experiencing the form.

Of course, this is something completely new in architecture, something unusual; and it takes time and work, and as it is already in our time – forgive the harsh expression – it also needs and has needed: money! And in this matter the willingness to make sacrifices on the part of some of our friends was so accommodating that we can say: this willingness to make sacrifices is, in a certain respect, a symbol of the way in which our spiritual movement has penetrated the understanding of souls.

I only wished to mention this, so that you may take this structure to your hearts, and feel it as a central point of our movement, so that you may think of yourselves as united with it, and may grant it your personal presence, as much as will be possible in the future, after the opening.

Notes from a lecture given in Prague^*

Given the large amount of literature available, it is always possible to learn about the findings of spiritual science, particularly when anthroposophical groups work together. Since we are together now, I would like to discuss some guiding ideas out of spiritual impulses, ideas that continue in a more esoteric way what we spoke about more generally in yesterday's public lecture.¹

Many people today still believe in the contrast between faith and knowledge, faith and cognition. They say science can tell us about the world outside us, the only one we can know of with certainty. However, concerning the spiritual world, we must have faith. This attitude appears to contradict spiritual science, which strives to give us real knowledge of and insight into the spiritual world. In fact, it has to enter souls in our time in just this form, as insight and knowledge. In earlier incarnations our souls were in a completely different condition than now. They were more primitive, but in those times there were great individuals and many people connected with them. Those individuals conveyed ideas of the spiritual world, which we can still find in certain tribes and peoples and trace to individuals such as Hermes, Zarathustra, Moses, Buddha, and Krishna.² Spiritual ideas had to be poured into people's souls.

In the physical world life is not just toil and work, but slaving and drudgery. Most of this toil and work is not in the sense of “it's been a hard day's work,” but in the sense of unconscious occurrences caused by our thinking—in fact, our whole soul life as it takes its course.

We are all much more alike when we are born than we think. We do not resemble each other in our appearance, but in our structure. The forces at work in a child are active at an unconscious level. The spirit takes hold of the body and structures it. Only then does the sculpting and elaborating of the nerves begin. This happens independently of our mind, at a time when we are not yet able to use it. Then we become aware of ourselves as an I. That is when the wisdom we have brought with us from the gods, from the spiritual world, ceases.

In the first period after birth, we have only life forces, so to speak; our life then is nothing but a continuation of the spiritual world. Death in infancy is due to external bodily causes, and the child's soul plays no part in it.

Then we begin to deplete our physical bodies with every thought, every feeling. We must sleep to make up for what we have depleted during the day. If we did not thus eat away at our physical organization, we would have a budding and burgeoning life. Our etheric body always wants to bud and to sprout, but the astral body needs to consume what the etheric body builds up, and thus suppresses it. When we are sleeping, compensation for what has been eaten away and killed off flows into us from the spiritual world to reestablish the balance. The normal amount of sleep replaces exactly as much as has been depleted. If we decided to sleep more, as some retired people do, we would sleep too much. Of course, that is no objection to sleeping a lot. Since intellectual work takes a lot out of our physical organization, people doing that kind of work need much sleep. But if we sleep too much, we have too many new life forces and these then begin to proliferate; the human being then abounds with life forces. This surplus of life forces leads to illness. So if we want to do more than merely make up for what we depleted through our daily work and advance spiritually, we have to consciously take what we need from the spiritual world.

The founders of our religions believed it was their task to lead their people, to use up life forces, which will then be compensated for. However, what has to develop within us for the progress of humanity must be consciously drawn from the spiritual world so that it will not die in our physical existence.

That is why the founders of our religions provided ideas they had received from the spiritual world. These truly spiritual thoughts nourish our soul and maintain it. It would be the death of our soul if it always had to live in thoughts taken only from the physical world. In earlier times, religious beliefs were such spiritual thoughts human souls need. That phase of our development has been completed, and we live now in a time when we on earth will gradually lose the ability to take in what speaks only to our emotions, our faith. We can still preserve this faith for a time, galvanizing it, so to speak, but we cannot keep it for the future. The principle “I believe” has to be replaced with “I believe what I know.” People will begin to feel that this new principle must be applied. Otherwise we deny ourselves any possibility of knowing something about the life between death and a new birth. Then we would return to pitiful conditions in our next incarnation. Enthusiasm for other ideals, all clearly justified, is certainly a good thing and has to exist. However, in comparison with the foundations of spiritual science, these ideals cannot be put into practice directly. Lacking its knowledge, they can only be precursors of spiritual science.

As we progress in our spiritual research, we will feel the need to remain silent rather than to speak. If we speak nevertheless, it is out of insight into the conditions necessary for our time. Knowledge alone will make us free, and it is the task of the future to win the freedom of the human soul.

Thoughts of great spiritual power came from the founders of our religions. They were thoughts of faith that could wonderfully illuminate the region beyond death. These ideas were transformed into a true, spiritual light that revealed the environment beyond death to human beings. But the time will come when we will have to live in freedom. And even if new religious leaders were still to proclaim the old teachings of faith with the voice and the power of the gods, we would no longer understand them. We are experiencing this now. The sciences concerned with the outer world have arrived, as they had to. A great contemporary scientist, Max Müller, said that if an angel were to come down and proclaim news of the spiritual world, people would not understand or believe him.³

That is the development of humanity. It seems to lead inevitably to the loss of our ability to imbue ourselves with thoughts related to the spiritual worlds. That would mean we would have less light after death to illuminate our spiritual environment by ourselves. After all, no sun will shine from the outside on the world around us then, the light has to come from us. We then take the place of the sun and illuminate our surroundings after death. People unable to do this will have to return and repeat life on earth to assimilate thoughts and ideas that are fruitful for their existence after death. When we understand this, more than the usual enthusiasm for spreading spiritual science will loosen our tongue and prompt us to speak. Believing in what we know—that will be the need of humanity in the future.

In ancient times, religious ideas, myths, and fairy tales gave souls light for the spiritual world. It is easy to say that myths and fairy tales developed in the childhood stages of the human race. Of course, people did not physically meet the angels that myths and fairy tales speak about. But thinking based on philosophy will be of little use in the spiritual world where such knowledge has no meaning. It is easy to say fairy tales are not based on truth. Spiritual researchers are not so naive, and know that fiery dragons do not really fly through the air. However, they always knew it was necessary to form the Imagination of the fiery dragon, for when it lives in the soul, it casts light on the spiritual world. These are powerful Imaginations. That is the principle behind all myths; they are not intended to reflect external reality accurately, but to enable us to live in the spiritual world.

Materialists say myths and fairy tales originated in the childhood stage of the human race. But in its childhood, humanity was taught by the gods. In the process of our evolution, myths and fairy tales are gradually lost, but children should not grow up without them. It makes a tremendous difference whether or not children are allowed to grow up with fairy tales. The power of the fairy tale images, which give wings to the soul, becomes apparent only at a later age. Growing up without fairy tales leads later to boredom, to world-weariness. Indeed, it can even cause physical symptoms—fairy tales can help to prevent illnesses. The qualities that seep into our soul from fairy tales later emerge as a zest for life, enthusiasm for being alive, and an ability to cope with life, all of which can be seen even in old age. Children have to experience the power of the content of fairy tales while they are young and can still do so. People who cannot live with ideas that have no reality on the physical plane will be dead to the spiritual world. Philosophies based only on the material world are the death of our soul. Physical evolution leads to the death of the spiritual world. We must reach a view of the world based not on appearances, but resting solidly on its own inherent structure. We have to move toward the principle: I believe what I know.

We have to learn to pay attention to the symptoms of our cultural life. For example, I once gave a lecture in a town in southern Germany, and afterward two Catholic priests came up to me and said that I was only speaking to educated people, while they spoke so everyone could understand them. In reality, the opposite is the case. Anthroposophy can reach everyone provided we find the way to the simple, ordinary people. The farmer would understand it much better than the so-called educated person if only the way were not blocked by social conventions. In these matters, we must be able to leave ourselves completely out of the picture and not ask what we think best. Instead, we must ask what human souls require in a given era. So I replied to the priests that while their feeling tells them they speak to everyone, the facts will tell them they do not, because not everyone comes to hear them. And it is to those who do not come to them that I speak.

On earth we gain knowledge and insight through our physical and etheric bodies. Let us examine carefully how much of what is in our soul comes from the physical world. Light, for example, reaches us through the eyes. The process of seeing is one of deterioration right from its start in the eyes. The deterioration starts directly at the retina. The process detaches itself from life. In the morning, after sleep, our eyes have been restored and are filled with pure life. However, as we perceive, something forms in the living tissue that is no longer alive but only mineral. And we perceive the outer world, which is mirrored in us, because this process continues in the nerve tissue. Thus, insofar as the physical body is the bearer of these processes, it is not alive.

The etheric body is the bearer of thoughts that are also mirror images. People could easily discover that our thoughts reflect the super-sensible. Thoughts will never lend themselves to inspection under the microscope because in reality they live in the etheric body. They are formed by our thinking, which is mirrored in the physical body. We can see from this that understanding and knowledge are dependent on the physical and etheric bodies, which are affected only by the impressions of the physical world. Completely different thoughts have to take hold in our soul, in our astral body, and all our feeling, willing, and thinking not limited to the physical plane. Otherwise we will remain inwardly dead. All thoughts that represent objects are meaningful only on the physical plane. This is implied in the very question, “Are thoughts that do not represent objects justified?” Only with the thoughts living freely in the spirit, living freely in the astral body and the I can we gain insight, only with those thoughts can we live. These thoughts not only represent things, but are also inwardly active and alive; they create something out of themselves and out of us.

In modern art, naturalism predominates these days. In ancient times the soul was filled with images that brought activity into the thoughts of the astral body. Everything depicting only outer things is meaningless in the spiritual world. We must imbue ourselves with new images that can once again meaningfully permeate our soul. Often we take hold of something we believe to exist only in our imagination, to be only fantasy. This is frequently only a memory of something originating on the physical plane. We can revitalize what would otherwise die in our soul only by enlivening our images with thoughts that do not originate on the physical level and are not created by that kind of imagination.

People increasingly misuse the phrase: A beautiful soul in a beautiful body, a healthy soul in a healthy body. This phrase was appropriate for the understanding of earlier times. Unfortunately, today it is seen as a statement of cause; if someone has a healthy body, people conclude that a healthy soul lives in it. Whatever makes the body healthy will do the same for the soul.

If people do not develop thoughts that keep the astral body inwardly agile, they will suffer from mineral deposits even in childhood and as a result become ill later in life. And the world they enter after death will remain dark, because they do not radiate any light themselves. The rays of the sun strike a surface and that is how we see things. But in the spiritual world we are the source of light; we illuminate the surroundings we are supposed to see. Souls feeling the need to pursue spiritual science may not be aware of these circumstances, but they live in the depths of the soul. Just as in the physical world sunlight comes from the outside, so we must make ourselves sunlike in the spiritual world. We have to light in ourselves the spiritual fuel, the inner flame, to illuminate the realm of the spirit.

Physicists imagine the red of a rose can be traced to oscillation, to variations in wavelength. People say there is really no sound, only vibrations of air. They claim what we hear as sound exists only in our ears. Well, a simple experiment can teach us otherwise, namely, if we have someone wake us up by knocking on the door. We will notice that we were not conscious during the night when we were asleep, but that on waking up we were already living in the knocking. We ourselves have to enter into the knocking sound. We use the other person to do the knocking because our soul itself cannot do it. If we resolved firmly to wake up, we could do so, but this way we are only using the other person as a tool.

If materialist views continue to persist for several generations more, the red of roses will really disappear. People will actually see little gray atoms vibrating as an atomic whirl, not because they have to see them or because they exist, but because they will have trained themselves to see them. That is why it is necessary to spread spiritual science, to prevent having to live in a future filled with nothing other than physical atoms swirling around.

We are not talking about the physical ether but the one that is living thought. We must realize first of all that a rose is not a mass of whirling atoms, but that behind it there are real living and interweaving elemental beings. The theory of the spiritual world is secondary; the main thing is to concentrate our feeling, to feel ourselves living and weaving in our new perception of the reality of the spiritual world. This is the resurrection of the spiritual world in our souls, the truly ecumenical Easter event.

Our ancestors required a different event that was connected to the time when the sun reaches its zenith. When everything in nature was budding and blossoming, they experienced an ecstasy that reaffirmed for them the existence of the spiritual world. What they experienced then at St. John's Tide we now have to experience in the spring, at Easter. We have to be able to celebrate the awakening of the soul, the resurrection of the soul, when spiritual science speaks to us not merely as a theory, but as living knowledge.

• *. The following two lectures differ in character and content from the preceding five. In both, Rudolf Steiner approaches the central theme from a much wider perspective. In addition, “Faith and Knowledge” is not a complete, word for word, record of a lecture but notes summarizing what Steiner said. Therefore, the two lectures have been placed in the appendix.
• 1. Lecture of April 16, 1914, entitled “Wie findet die Menschenseele ihre wahre Wesenheit?” (“How Can the Human Soul Find Its True Essence?”).
• 2. Hermes, the ancient Greek herald and messenger of the gods. See also Lecture Three, note 5.
• 3. Max Müller, 1823–1900, German orientalist, linguist, and religious scholar, professor of philology at Oxford. Literally: “A change is to take place, a transformation of such magnitude that even if angels came down and announce it, we would understand it as little as an infant would understand what we told it about the world in our language,” in Leben und Religion (“Life and Religion”), Stuttgart, n.y.

On July 15, 1889, I was standing in the St. Leonhard cemetery near Graz with the writer Rosegger and the sculptor Hans Brandstetter as the body of the Austrian poet Robert Hamerling was lowered into the grave.¹ Robert Hamerling had been called from the physical plane a few days earlier. He died after decades of unutterable suffering that grew to an unbearable level at the end of his life. Prior to the burial, the body had been laid out in the beautiful Stifting House on the outskirts of the Austro-Styrian town of Graz. The physical form left behind by his great soul lay there, a wonderful reflection of a life of striving to reach the highest levels of the spirit: so expressive, so eloquent was this physical form. It also bore the imprint of the unspeakable suffering this poet had had to endure in his life!

On that occasion a little girl of ten could be seen among the closest mourners. She was Robert Hamerling's ward and had brightened and cheered the poet's last years with the promise of her character. She was the girl to whom Robert Hamerling had dedicated the lines that fundamentally reveal his mood in the last years of his life.² And because they let us see so deeply into Hamerling's soul, please permit me to read you these lines:

To B.(ertha)

Child, like a butterfly harmlessly
Fluttering past the pain-racked invalid,
When having seen me begin the homeward journey,
In the wake of suffering
Do not think of me in your flush of youth:
A fleeting thought is all that you would give;
Nor when happily in love, in marriage or in motherhood:
Your memory would be only a pale reflection in the bustle of your life.
Only at sixty years of age, please think of me:
The poor sick man you saw
Year after year stretched on a bed of suffering,
Who, tortured by unceasing pain,
Spoke little, save laborious groans;
Nothing was he to you and nothing could he be.
At sixty years of age, child, think of him:
Then you will muse on him, muse long,
And late, deep compassion will rise in you
For him then long at rest from suffering.
A teardrop fills your eye as offering
For him long paled in death,
Who nothing was to you, and nothing could be.

It is not necessary to describe the situation of a poet who could write lines that speak so powerfully of his suffering in virtually the entire second half of his life. There was much gossip, even after Hamerling had already been confined to his bed for a large part of his life, and allegations about the sybaritic life the author of “Ahasver” supposedly led. It was even rumored that he lived in a sumptuous house in Graz, and that he had a large number of girls for his pleasure, who had to perform Greek dances day after day and other such things. All these stories were told at a time when illness kept him laid up while the sun was shining outside. He was forced to stay in bed in his small room, knowing that outside the sun was shining on the meadows, on the glorious nature he had enjoyed so much in the brief periods he was able to leave his sickbed.

And this same bright sun was shining gloriously when we accompanied the deceased to his last resting place on July 15, 1889. There are few indeed who lived under such outward constraints and yet were devoted with every fiber of their soul to what is great, beautiful, monumental, magnificent, and joyous in the world.

I remember one time sitting with a young musician in Vienna who was a great friend of Hamerling's. This young man was essentially a poor fellow who soon succumbed to a mental illness. He was deeply pessimistic and never tired of complaining about life. And since he loved Hamerling a great deal, he loved to cite the poet in his complaints about life. On this occasion, the young musician once again wanted to quote Hamerling as a pessimist. As we were sitting together in a cafe, I was able to call for a newspaper that contained a small occasional poem by Hamerling entitled “Personal Request.” I showed it to the young musician.

Personal Request

Say that I write bad verses,
Say that I steal the silverware,
Say I'm a rotten German
Because my diet says I can't eat Jews
And Slavs for breakfast;
Or that I betray our Austria
Because I sing the praise of Bismarck.
Say that I'm stricken with grief because
Praise for me is sadly lacking,
Slandered I am basely on occasion—
But I ask one thing only:
Do not say that I'm a pessimist,
That the last word in my singing
Belongs to blasé-modern
Stupid, dull unhappiness with living!
What? The poet is a pessimist
Because he makes complaining noises?
Just because the world is lovely
And life seems so charming to him
He would painfully regret it
If his part he were to forfeit.
If you call pessimists all persons
Who complain, then pessimistic
Is the man from whom a cry
Escapes while he is at the dentist!
Everything the critics say, believe them,
Except that I'm a pessimist!
I hate this word. To me it smells
Rather like its final syllable.³

These words characterize Hamerling's attitude and show that he lived in greatest pain (he wrote as much to Rosegger) at the time of writing this poem “Personal Request.” He wrote to Rosegger: “I am not worried about becoming a pessimist, but I do fear going mad or becoming an imbecile, as sometimes I can manage only a few minutes respite from the never-ending pain!”⁴ The man who began his poetic career with words truly sounding like a lifetime's program was worried about going mad or becoming an imbecile, but not about becoming a pessimist. For when Robert Hamerling sent his first major poem, “Venus in Exile,” out into the world, he gave it the motto:

Go on your way, a holy messenger,
And sing in joyful tones
Of the dawning day,
Of the realm of beauty to come.

That was his attitude throughout his life. We must recall one very memorable scene if we want to fully understand Hamerling's unique nature. A few months or weeks before his death, he moved from his flat in Graz—where he lived on the street then called Realschulstrasse; now it is Hamerlingstrasse—to a small summer house, called Stifting House, situated in a secluded area on the outskirts of the town. Two servants had to carry the invalid down; his flat was three floors up. Several times he almost fainted. But on either side of him he had a parcel tied up with a broad ribbon, which went round his neck like a stole; they contained the wrapped manuscript of his last work, The Atomistic Will.⁵ This was characteristic of the way this poet lived and of what he loved. He did not want the manuscript of this philosophical work to leave his hands for even a minute! He was so ill that two servants had to carry him down; yet he had to hold on to the thing that filled his life. So he was carried down and taken out to Stifting House in the most beautiful sunshine, sighing, “Oh, what pleasure to ride like this; if only I were less ill, less ill!”

The soul and spirit at work under these physical conditions remained open to all that is great and beautiful, all that is filled with spirit in the world. It worked out of the wellsprings of greatness, beauty, and spirituality in such a way that we cannot really be surprised by his attitude to pessimism. We cannot be surprised to see in Hamerling's spirit living cosmic evidence that the spiritual forces in us can triumph over material and natural forces, however obstructive they may be, in every situation.

Fifty-nine years earlier, that is in 1830, Robert Hamerling was born in Austria in an area called Waldviertel.⁶ Because of its special natural configuration that region is eminently suited—and was probably more so then than now when it is crisscrossed by railroad lines—to concentrate the soul inwardly if it is awake and to deepen the soul. The Waldviertel region is basically a backwater of civilization, although someone was born and lived there in the first half of the nineteenth century who was also widely known in Austria this side of the river Leitha. He has probably been forgotten by now, and at most continues to live in the memory of the people in the Waldviertel, in numerous folk legends. I have to add that I often heard tell of this person's fame because my parents came from the Waldviertel area. Thus, I could at least hear about the remnants of his peculiar fame, which is characteristic of the atmosphere of cultural isolation in that region. This famous person was none other than one of the “most famous” robbers and murderers of the time, namely, Grasel. This Grasel was certainly more famous than anyone else who came from the Waldviertel region.

In his later years, Hamerling wrote about the Waldviertel area, and I want to read you just a few lines from what he said about his native region where he lived for the first ten or fifteen years of his life, because I believe these words can throw much greater light on Hamerling's nature than any academic characterization. He writes:

I do not know how much the construction of a railroad skirting the Waldviertel area has affected the latter's isolation from the world. In 1867, the appearance of a stranger still created quite a stir there. If such a person came along on foot or by coach, the oxen plowing the fields came to a halt and turned their heads to gawk at the new apparition. The farmer made one or two feeble attempts to drive them on with his whip—but in vain, and finally, he did likewise, and the plow rested until the stranger had disappeared behind the next hill or forest. That, too, is the image of an idyllic atmosphere!⁷

Hamerling's life and personality are an example of a soul growing out of and beyond its environment, and of an individuality's development. He was the son of a poor weaver. Since they were completely impoverished, his parents were evicted from their home at a time when Hamerling was not yet capable of even saying “I.” His father was forced to go abroad while his mother remained in the Waldviertel area, in Schonau, with the young boy. There the child experienced the beauties of the Waldviertel region. A scene from that time remained always in his memory of an experience he believed actually gave him his own being. The seven-year-old boy was going down a hill. It was evening, and the sun was setting in the west. Something came toward him, golden, out of the golden sunshine, and Hamerling describes what was shining forth in the golden light as follows:

Among the most significant memories of my boyhood, but also most difficult to convey, are the often strange moods that passed through my soul when I was a roaming boy. In part they came from the moment's lively impressions and stimulation, usually from nature around me, in part they were waking dreams and premonitions. Speaking about himself, the mystic Jakob Böhme used to say that the higher meaning, the mystical life of the spirit was awakened in him miraculously at the moment when he was dreamily absorbed in gazing at a pewter bowl sparkling in the sunlight. ^{8Jakob Böhme, 1575–1624. German mystic. He was first a shoemaker, then had a mystical experience in 1600.} Perhaps every spiritual person has a pewter bowl like Böhme's as the origin of his real inner awakening. I vividly recall a certain evening when I was about seven years old. I was going down a hill, and the sunset shone toward me like a miracle, a spiritual vision. It filled my heart with an unforgettably strange mood, with a presentiment that today seems to me like a calling, reflecting my future destiny. In high spirits, I hurried toward an unknown destination; yet, at the same time my soul was filled with a melancholy that made me want to cry. If that moment could have been explained out of the surrounding circumstances, if it had not been so completely unique, it would surely not have remained so indelibly in my memory.⁹

Thus, in the poet's seventh year the poetic and spiritual muse drew near. At that time, the seed for everything that was later to become of this soul was laid into it from out of the cosmos, so to speak. The nice thing is that Hamerling ascribes his poetic calling to such an event, as if it were a miracle the cosmos itself performed on him.

Because of his parents' poverty, the boy had to be educated at the Cistercian monastery of Zwettl.¹⁰ In return for his school lessons, he had to sing in the monastery choir. At that time, Hamerling was between ten and fourteen years old. He formed a close relationship to a strange personality at the monastery, namely, Father Hugo Traumihler, a person completely given over to mystical contemplation and a strict ascetic life. At that time the boy already possessed a thirst for the beauty of the cosmos and an urge to deepen his soul. You can imagine that he was inspired by the inner experiences Father Traumihler described from his inner contemplation of the secrets of the heart and soul. He was a mystic of a very elementary, primitive kind who nevertheless made a deep impression on Hamerling's soul.

But it is impossible to talk about the poet Hamerling without mentioning what was such a great part of his longing: the longing to be a great human being. When he returned on a trip to the Waldviertel long after he had left the area, people who knew that he came from there asked him what he wanted to be.¹¹ But although he was already well past twenty, Hamerling had not thought about what he wanted to be. This realization brought it home to him that at that age you cannot avoid the question “What do you want to do?” The only thing he could tell himself was: “Well, I cannot really tell them what I want to be, because they would not understand. For when I am asked what I want to be, I want to answer: I want to become a human being!” So sometimes he said he wanted to be a philologist or an astronomer or something like that. People could understand that. But they would not have understood that someone who had finished his studies might intend to become a human being.

Well, much could be said about the development of Hamerling as a poet and, above all, about the unfolding of three things in his soul. The first he later described in The Atomistic Will by saying that the Greeks called the universe “cosmos,” a word connected with beauty.¹² That, to him, was characteristic of the Greek spirit, for his soul was filled with the beauty that resonates throughout the universe. And his heart's desire was to see humankind in turn permeated by that beauty; that was what he wanted to express in poetic form. So everything in him strove toward beauty, toward the beauty-filled world of the Greeks. Yet he saw so many aspects of life that cast a pall over the beauty intended by nature. For him beauty was identical with spirituality. He would often survey everything he knew about Hellenism and then look with sadness at modern culture, the readers of his poetry. He wanted to write poetry for this modern culture in order to fill it with sounds that would encourage people to bring beauty and spirituality back into life, and thus return happiness to life on earth. Hamerling found it impossible to speak of a discrepancy between the world and beauty in human life. He was inspired by the belief that life should be infused with beauty, that beauty should be alive in the world, and from his youth on he would have preferred to live for that alone. It was like an instinct in his soul. But he had met with much that showed him the modern age must struggle through many things that frustrate our ideals in life.

Hamerling was a student in 1848. He was a member of the liberation movement and was arrested by the police for this “great crime” and given a special punishment, as happened to many who had been part of the liberation movement in Vienna at that time. If they went beyond what the police thought permissible, they were taken to the barber where their hair was cut as a sign that they were “democrats.” These days you no longer risk having your hair cut just because you hold liberal views—progress indeed! The other thing not allowed at that time was the wearing of a broad-brimmed hat. This again was taken as a sign of liberal views. One had to wear a so-called “topper,” a top hat, which had full police approval.

Hamerling had to put up with this and much else. Let me just mention one more event as a small indication of how the world treated the great poet; I believe it leads to a much better characterization than an abstract description. The event I am referring to happened when Hamerling had concluded his years at university and was about to take his teaching examination. He had good grades in Greek, Latin, and mathematics. Indeed, he received excellent grades on his Greek and Latin. But if we read further in his report card, we find that although Hamerling claimed to have read some grammar books, his performance in the examination did not indicate a thorough study of the German language. This was said of the man who has enriched the German language so immeasurably through his unique style!

I would like to draw your attention to another experience Hamerling had. In 1851, he became acquainted with a family and one evening was invited to stay for a party. He would have gladly joined them, but he could not stay. Then the daughter of the family had a glass of punch sent over to his student quarters. What were his feelings then? He suddenly had the urge to take pencil and paper, and he felt himself transported into another world. At first he saw images of world history, presented as if in a large tableau. Then these images were transformed into a chaos of blossoms, rot, blood, newts, golden fruits, blue eyes, harp music, destruction of life, the thunder of cannons, and quarreling people. Historical scenes alternated with blossoms and salamanders. Then, as if crystallizing from out of the whole, a pale, serious figure with penetrating eyes appeared. At the sight of this figure, Hamerling came to. He looked at the piece of paper. The paper, blank before the vision, had written on it the name Ahasver and below, the outline for the poem “Ahasver.”

Hamerling's interest in everything that moves the human soul to its heights and depths was of rare profundity, and combined with a drunkenness with beauty, so to speak. That is why the ten years he spent teaching high school in Trieste on the glorious Adriatic and taking his vacations in neighboring Venice may be described as a happy time for him. He got to know Venice so well that years later he still knew all the nooks and crannies and little alleys where he had walked many times on beautiful evenings. There he saw radiant nature and southern beauty, for which his soul had such a yearning. This southern beauty blossomed in “Greeting in Song from the Adriatic.” Like his early works, this poem shows Hamerling's extraordinary talent. It was followed by “Venus in Exile.” Hamerling conceived of Venus not only as the embodiment of earthly love, but as the bearer of the beauty that rules and holds sway in the cosmos, a beauty that is in exile as far as modern humanity is concerned. Robert Hamerling's longing as a poet was to liberate beauty and love from their exile. Hence the motto I read to you:

Go on your way, a holy messenger,
And sing in joyful tones
Of the dawning day,
Of the realm of beauty to come.

But Hamerling's soul could not sing of the “dawning day, / Of the realm of beauty to come” without looking into all the dark recesses of the human soul. The vision of Ahasver shows what Robert Hamerling saw in those recesses. It continued to stand before his soul until he found the poetic form for the personality of Ahasver. Ahasver became the thread running through human life as the personification of an individuality who wants to escape life but cannot. This individuality is then contrasted with that of Nero in Rome, a man always seeking life but unable to find it in sensual saturation and therefore eternally searching.

We can see how life's contradictions confronted Hamerling. This becomes even clearer in his poem “The King of Sion” where he describes a person who wants to bring spiritual salvation from lofty heights to his fellow human beings but falls prey to human weaknesses in the process, to sensuality and so on. Hamerling was always reflecting on the proximity of opposites in life, and he wanted to give this poetic form. Greece arose before his soul in the form to which he wanted to restore it. In Aspasia, he described the Greece of his imagination, the country of his yearning, the world of beauty, including the negative aspects such a world of beauty may also bear. In the form of a three-part novel, Aspasia became a wonderful poem about cultural history.

Robert Hamerling was not understood, as I learned when I met a man in a godforsaken place whose eyes burned with resentment and whose mouth had an ugly expression. I do not mean physical ugliness, of course; physical ugliness can actually radiate beauty of the highest degree. This man was one of the most vicious critics of Aspasia. In comparison with the beauty-filled poet, that man appeared to be one of the ugliest men, and it was clear why his bitter soul could not understand Hamerling.

All of Robert Hamerling's endeavors were of this order. There would be much to tell if I were to recount the whole of his progress through history. He sought to deal with Dante and Robespierre, ending with Homunculus, in whom he wished to embody all of the grotesqueness of modern culture. There would also be much to tell if I were to describe how Hamerling's lyrical muse sought to find the reflective sounds permeating his works in the beauty and colors of nature and in the spirit of nature. Again, there would be much to say if I wanted to give you even just an idea of how Hamerling's lyrical poetry is alive with everything that can comfort our souls regarding the small things in the great ones, or how his poems can give us the invincible faith that the kingdom of beauty will triumph in the human soul however much the demons of discord and ugliness might try to establish their rule. Hamerling's soul suffered in life; yet in the midst of the deepest, most painful suffering, his soul could find joy in the beauty of spiritual activity. His soul could see the discords of the day all around, and yet could immerse itself deeply in the beauty of the night when the starry heavens rose above the waters. Hamerling was able to give meaningful expression to this mood.

I wanted to describe briefly, by means of a few episodes out of Hamerling's life, an image of Robert Hamerling as a poet of the late nineteenth century who was filled with an invincible awareness of the better future of humanity because he was steeped completely in the truth of the beauty of the universe. At the same time, he was a poet who could describe how the spirit can be victorious in us over all the material obstacles and hindrances to our spiritual nature.

It is impossible to understand the poet Hamerling without reference to his lifelong effort to answer the question: How do I become a human being? Everything he created has human greatness, though not always poetic excellence, for Hamerling's stature as a poet is a consequence of his human greatness. When he saw disharmony in life, Hamerling always felt an invincible urge in his soul to find the corresponding harmony, to find the way in which all things ugly must dissolve into beauty when we look at them rightly.

In conclusion, I want to read you a small, insignificant poem typical of Hamerling. In conception and thought it belongs to his early years, but it does characterize the mood, albeit in primitive poetic simplicity, that accompanied him throughout his life:

The Lion and the Rose

On a deep red rose
The angry lion trod
His paw caught fast the thorn
Of this delicate bud.

His paw swelled large;
In angry pain he died.
Refreshed, the red rose drank
The early morning dew.

Be the delicate ever so delicate,
The rough ever so rough,
That which is fragile, gentle, pure—
Beauty, triumphs over all.¹³

This mood—we can see it in everything he wrote—accompanied Hamerling through his life:

Be the delicate ever so delicate,
The rough ever so rough,
That which is fragile, gentle, pure—
Beauty, triumphs over all.

• 1. PeterRosegger, 1843–1918, Austrian poet and novelist. Hans Brandstetter, 1854–1925, Austrian sculptor. Robert Hamerling, pseudonym of Rupert Hammerling 1830–1889, Austrian poet. Best known for his epics Ahasverus in Rom 1865 and Homunculus (1888).
• 2. “An B(ertha),” Hamerling's last poem; written in the Stiftin House on June 18, 1889, three weeks before his death. In Letzte Grüsse aus Stiftinghaus, in Hamerlings Sämtliche Werke (Hamerling's Collected Works), Leipzig 1893, 16 volumes, edited by Michael Rabenlechner, vol. 15, p. 90.
• 3“The Pessimist” in Letzte Grüsse aus Stiftinghaus, p. 91. Translator's note. The final syllable of the German word “Pessimist” (mist) means “dung” in English.
• 4. Letter of June 11, 1888, in Peter Rosegger, Persönliche Erinnerungen an Robert Hamerling, Vienna 1891, p. 177.
• 5. Hamerling's philosophical work, published in 1891.
• 6. The Waldviertel is a region in northwestern Lower Austria.
• 7Robert Hamerling, “Die schönste Gegend der Erde,” vol. 16 in his Collected Works, p. 134, and “Stationen meiner Lebenspilgerschaft,” same volume, p. 17.
• 9. Hamerling, “Stationen meiner Lebenspilgerschaft,” p. 17.
• 10. “Stationen meiner Lebenspilgerschaft”, p. 45.
• 11. “People still have the bad habit of asking me what I want to become—well, a human being!” from “Lehrjahre der Liebe,” in Tagebuchblätter und Briefe (Diaries and Letters), entry of April 13, 1851. Volume 14 in Hamerling's Collected Works.
• 12. Literally: “The Greeks called the universe ‘beauty’ (cosmos).” In Atomtstik des Willens, Hamburg 1891, vol. 11, p. 226.
• 13. In Letzte Grüsse aus Stiftinghaus, vol. 15 in Hamerling's Collected Works, pp. 34–35.

I am very glad that we can meet here today and take a break, so to speak, for a while from the work on our new building in Dornach.¹ But I thought it would be impossible to gather here so near our building without also discussing anthroposophical matters. I hope we can do this more often in the course of the year; otherwise our friends working on the building will not have as many opportunities to attend such meetings as they do when they are not working on our building.

Let us start with some thoughts on the life of the spirit that might be useful in considering what meaning spiritual science and living with anthroposophy can have for us, for our soul. People new to anthroposophical thinking, feeling, and perception may think we should not worry about the life of the spirit, about the spiritual world, since we enter the spiritual world anyway after death (even a materialist might say this) and will there learn all we need to know about it. Why should we not be satisfied in this life between birth and death simply to do what is necessary for life in the physical world; why is it wrong when we just fulfill our duties in the physical world, and leave matters concerning the spiritual world in the realm of the uncertain and indefinite? One could hear these words often during the time when the tide of materialism engulfed human development, especially in the last third of the nineteenth century. And it was by no means the most morally reprehensible souls who said: While on earth, let us concentrate on our tasks here and leave the rest for the world we enter after death.

Now, let us talk about something that can be grasped immediately by anyone who begins to concern himself with—I do not even want to say spiritual science—but with truly logical thinking. We actually spend only part of our time between birth and death in the physical world, namely, our waking time. And even people who have not yet thought much about the spiritual world, but who can think logically, would have to admit that with our conscious mind we know as little about life in sleep as we do about life after death. And certainly no one can deny that we continue to live in sleep—unless such a person were prepared to accept that we really die every evening and are created anew each morning. That is unlikely, but the truly logical person will be equally unable to accept that the whole human being is really present in a sleeping body lying in bed.

The fact that we sleep regularly should at least make people think. And then they will be motivated to reflect on what spiritual science has to offer. In particular, the natural sciences will more and more realize that our soul is not present in our physical body when we sleep. In fact, they will reach this conclusion on their own before the end of this century of scientific development. Then they will look to spiritual science for answers to their questions. They will be forced by their own conclusions to realize that our soul-spiritual being is really not connected with our physical body when we are sleeping. It will then become ever more important for people in the twentieth century to know something about sleep. Therefore let us begin today and get an idea of what people in our century will have to know about the nature of sleep.

We know from our studies in spiritual science that when we fall asleep, two members of our being, the ego and the astral body, leave the physical and etheric bodies. Where are the ego and the astral body when we are asleep? To begin with, we can say they are in the spiritual world. Of course, we are always in the spirit realm, because the latter is not separated from the physical world, but surrounds us just as air envelops us everywhere. We are always in the spiritual world, even when we are awake.

However, we inhabit it in a different way when we are asleep than when we are awake. Now, it may be sufficient for the immediate needs of spiritual science to describe this situation by saying that in sleep our ego and astral body are outside our physical and etheric bodies. But then we would actually be telling only half the truth. It is the same as saying the sun sets here at night; because the sun in fact sets then only for us in Europe. We know this does not apply to all the inhabitants of the earth. Fundamentally, the ego and astral body leave our physical and etheric bodies properly, we might say, completely, only after death. In sleep they actually leave only the blood and nervous system. But when the “sun” of our being, namely, the ego and astral body, sets in relation to our blood and nervous system, which they penetrate during the day, it rises for the other half of our being, that is, for the other organs.

Our ego and astral body do just what the sun does, which shines here during the day and when it sets for us, it rises for the people on the other side of the earth. When ego and astral body “set” for our blood and nervous system, they rise for the other organs and are linked all the more strongly with them.

These other organs, to which our ego and astral body are connected when we sleep, have been constructed out of the spirit, as has everything else in the world. And the remarkable fact is that while we are sleeping, we strongly influence these other organs of our body with our ego and astral body. During the day, our ego and astral body work strongly upon our blood and nervous system, but they influence our other organs, all those not part of the blood and nervous system but which affect the blood from the nerves, when we are asleep.

From this follows that it is of some consequence how we enter sleep with our ego and astral body. Materialists will not care much about what happens in sleep to their ego and astral body, which they never mention anyway. However, those who understand these things will know that the organs that are not part of the blood and nervous system and do not manifest in our conscious existence are dependent on those aspects of our ego and astral body that are active in sleep.

Let me illustrate this with an obvious example. As we know, people today are haunted by a fear we can compare with the medieval fear of ghosts. It is the fear of germs. Objectively, both states of fear are the same. Both fit their respective age: People of the Middle Ages held a certain belief in the spiritual world; therefore quite naturally they had a fear of spiritual beings. The modern age has lost this belief in the spiritual world; it believes in material things. It therefore has a fear of material beings, be they ever so small. Objectively speaking, the greatest difference we might find between the two periods is that ghosts are at any rate sizable and respectable. The tiny germs, on the other hand, are nothing much to write home about as far as frightening people is concerned. Now of course I do not mean to imply by this that we should encourage germs, and that it is good to have as many as possible. That is certainly not the implication. Still, germs certainly exist and ghosts existed also, especially as far as those people who held a real belief in the spiritual world are concerned. Thus, they do not even differ in terms of reality.

However, the important point we want to make today is that germs can become dangerous only if they are allowed to flourish. Germs should not be allowed to flourish. Even materialists will agree with this statement, but they will no longer agree with us if we proceed further and, from the standpoint of proper spiritual science, speak about the most favorable conditions for germs. Germs flourish most intensively when we take nothing but materialistic thoughts into sleep with us. There is no better way to encourage them to flourish than to enter sleep with only materialistic ideas, and then to work from the spiritual world with the ego and the astral body on those organs that are not part of the blood and the nervous system. The only other method that is just as good is to live in the center of an epidemic or endemic illness and to think of nothing but the sickness all around, filled only with a fear of getting sick. That would be equally effective. If fear of the illness is the only thing created in such a place and one goes to sleep at night with that thought, it produces afterimages, Imaginations impregnated with fear. That is a good method of cultivating and nurturing germs. If this fear can be reduced even a little by, for example, active love and, while tending the sick, forgetting for a time that one might also be infected, the conditions are less favorable for the germs.

These issues are not raised in anthroposophy merely to play on human egotism, but to describe the facts of the spiritual world. This concrete case demonstrates that in real life we cannot avoid dealing with the spiritual world, because it is the basis for our actions between going to sleep and waking up. If people were given thoughts that lead them away from materialism and spur them on to active love out of the spirit, it would serve the future of humanity better. Then infinitely more productive work could be achieved than through all the preparations now being developed by materialistic science against germs. In the course of this century, the insight has to spread more and more widely that the spiritual world is by no means irrelevant to our physical life, but is of essential importance to it because we are in the spiritual world between going to sleep and waking up, and continue to affect the physical body from there. Even if this is not immediately obvious, it is nevertheless true.

Now, we will have to get used to the fact that the direct healing powers of spiritual science have to work through the human community if we are to see these matters in the right light. What does it mean that some individual here or there enters the spiritual world in sleep with thoughts turned toward the realm of the spirit, while all around other people nourish and nurture the germ world with their materialistic thoughts, materialistic feelings, and with fears, which are always connected with materialism? What is the real nature of germs? Well, here we come to a subject essential for human life. When we see the air around us filled with different species of birds and the water filled with fishes, when we observe the life forms that creep along the earth and others frolicking on it and revealing themselves to our senses, we are looking at beings we can correctly describe as creatures of the developing Godhead in one form or another, even if they are occasionally harmful. But in the case of germ-like creatures resident and active in other living beings, in plants, animals, or humans, we are dealing with creations of Ahriman. To understand the existence of such creatures correctly we must know that they express spiritual facts, namely the relationship between human beings and Ahriman. This relationship is established through a materialistic attitude and purely egotistical states of fear. We see the conditions allowing the existence of such parasitic beings correctly if we realize that they are a symptom of Ahriman intervening in the world.

Clearly, then, it is not a matter of indifference whether we take materialistic or spiritual ideas with us into the spiritual world when we fall asleep. As soon as we realize this, we can no longer claim it is irrelevant whether or not we know of the spirit in this world. We have to start at a specific point if we really want to understand the great importance of spiritual scientific research for our life between birth and death.

It will become increasingly clear to us how this earthly life is connected with spiritual life. We rely on nature, which is on a lower level than we are, for our nourishment. For some time after death, the dead derive their nourishment from the ideas and the unconscious emotions that we here on earth take into sleep with us. Those who have died perceive a tremendous difference between people who in their waking life are filled only with materialistic feelings and ideas and also take them into sleep, and others who are wholly filled with spiritual ideas while awake and who continue to be filled with them in sleep. The two types of people are as different in their effect on the dead as a barren region where no food can grow, where people would starve, and a fruitful area that offers nourishment in abundance. For many years after death, the dead draw a vitality from the souls sleeping here on earth filled with spiritual content, a vitality that is similar, only transposed into the spiritual realm, to what we draw in our physical life from the beings of the kingdoms of nature below us. We literally turn ourselves into fruitful pastures for the dead when we fill ourselves with the ideas of spiritual science. And we turn ourselves into barren ground and starve the dead if we take only materialistic ideas and attitudes into sleep.

It is not out of the enthusiasm that leads to the establishment of many other associations and societies that we speak of spiritual science in these times. Rather, the urge to speak about it comes out of necessity and the heartfelt realization that in the twentieth century people will need it. Regardless of outer circumstances, those who fully understand how much the world needs spiritual science cannot help but talk about its results and share it with their fellow human beings. The power of the words at our disposal seems much too weak to meet the necessity of making spiritual science ever more available to those who would otherwise sink deeper and deeper into materialism.

Let us think about the nature of our relationship to the dead we were connected with in life, whom we can clearly visualize, and of whom we often think. What is our relationship to those who have died, apart from offering them spiritual nourishment by taking spiritual thoughts into sleep? What is our relationship with the dead in waking life?

If the dead draw nourishment from the content of our souls in sleep, then every thought that enters the spiritual world and is concerned with it and its beings can be perceived by the dead. On the other hand, if we do not cultivate such thoughts, the dead are deprived of them. Ideas related only to the material world, to things in nature, live in our souls in such a way that the dead cannot perceive them. These ideas, however scholarly or wise, are meaningless for the dead. As soon as we have thoughts about the spiritual world, not only the living but also the dead have immediate access to them. That is why we have often recommended that our friends read silently to an individual with whom they were closely connected and who has passed on to the spiritual world. One forms an image of the person and then, while thinking about him or her, one reads on a subject related to the spiritual world. The dead can then participate in the process, which is important. Although the dead are in the world we know through spiritual science, thoughts about the spiritual world must be produced on earth. The dead must perceive more than the spiritual world around them; they need the thoughts of those who live on earth, thoughts that for them are like perceptions.

The most important and the most beautiful thing we can give the dead is to read to them in the way I have just described. We can give something to the dead by reading on a spiritual subject. And if you doubt that this is useful, since the deceased is in the spiritual world anyway, just think that we can be surrounded by things and beings in the physical world, yet may not understand them. The understanding has to be acquired. Thus, although the deceased is in the spiritual world, thoughts from earth have to flow to him. Illuminating thoughts must flow up to those regions where the dead dwell, just as rain streams down from the clouds as a blessing to the physical world.

All these examples show that it is infinitely important even for the physical world to experience the spiritual world in thought. Obviously, we cannot wait until after death for knowledge about the spiritual world. In truth, a thorough study of the spiritual world shows us that we are not on earth for nothing; we are here to learn something that can be learned only on earth—a possession of such value that the living can give it even to the dead.

The close connection between our earth existence and life immediately after death also manifests in many other respects, but it is difficult to talk about this connection in concrete terms, because the words can so easily be misunderstood. People are greatly inclined to prejudice, and whenever a subject, such as the spiritual world and its beings, is discussed, certain motives of the heart provoke misunderstandings. When I tell of an individual case where there is this or that connection between a person's life here on earth and after death, people all too easily jump to the wrong conclusions out of a very understandable self-centeredness and apply the description of a particular case to themselves. They are tempted to think that things are quite different in their case; therefore, they will not experience something this beautiful after death. Instead of deriving satisfaction from the events described, the listeners out of egotism feel that their experience will not be equally exceptional after death.

As soon as we do more than just speak in general terms and deal with specific cases, we must develop selflessness so we can observe someone else's destiny without drawing conclusions about our own life. Then we will not worry that if the same does not happen to us, we are missing out on what is being described. These and similar reactions provide grounds for misunderstandings, which I want to avoid.

A short time ago, a very dear friend of ours died, and many of us attended his cremation.² He would have celebrated his forty-third birthday tomorrow, on May 6. In the final years of his life, he suffered much. I would like to tell here, parenthetically as it were, a wonderful story from his last years as his wife told it to me.³ During his great suffering, our friend fought not against admitting to himself that he had to suffer, but against saying that he was ill. He was not ill, he said. He suffered, yes, but he was not ill, and he was adamant that such a statement should not be taken as quibbling but as something meaningful. This definition, “I suffer, but I am not ill,” arose from his awareness that what he carried within him as spiritual science, what supported and carried him inwardly, defeated all attacks of illness. He was aware that he suffered, but the health of his soul is so great that, when he compared it to his physical condition, he could not call himself ill. This definition is very important and well-suited to permeate our soul as a feeling.

Anyway, we saw how the person concerned spent his last years on earth in a sick body, in a suffering body. Yet he did not see himself as sick but only as suffering. If we compare that with the spiritual life that has now begun for our friend, we will have a worthy image of what connects our earth existence with life after death. It is a fact of the spiritual world that a series of Imaginations was prepared in his body, a body that showed the symptoms of illness. A series of Imaginations, powerful Imaginations, lived, so to speak, in the sick limbs. He was completely filled with the content of the spiritual worlds. They lived in him in such a way that they worked on all those organs we are usually not as aware of as we are of our brain and nervous system, that is, organs we experience on a more subconscious level. These powerful Imaginations lived in these organs, and all the more so, the more outwardly ill these organs became. They prepared themselves and now face the soul of the deceased as a mighty tableau of the spiritual world. Now he is living in the images that were trapped in his sick organs, especially in his final years. They prepared themselves in such intensity that they now surround him as his spiritual world.

It is impossible to see more beautiful worlds, or to see the spiritual cosmos more perfectly and more beautifully, than those that blossom and unfold in spiritual art, which cannot be observed better anywhere else than through such a situation. Here, on the physical plane, an artist can create in beauty a piece of the world, so that the image on canvas or in marble lets us see more of the world than we do on our own. All of this, however, pales into insignificance in comparison to the spiritual world seen as it is and also as it arises and blossoms forth from the soul of the deceased who has been prepared by his karma in the way I have described. How he was prepared will be clear from his poetic works, which are now being printed and will appear soon.⁴ His poetry reveals that this kind of spiritual life and passage into the spiritual world after death are intimately connected with what we have for many years called the Christ-Impulse. The Christ-Impulse, in the sense spiritual science speaks of it, is beautifully alive in our friend's poetry.

In this connection I want to add something that can truly lead us to feel the relationship between the world of our earthly life and the one we pass through between death and a new birth. I will not present this connection with abstract thoughts, but so you can grasp it at the level of feeling. You see, one can be either stupid or clever here on the physical plane; one can even be a scholar—in the life after death it is of little importance whether one was stupid, clever, or learned if all these qualities relate only to the things of the physical world. Our thoughts about the material world may be ever so clever; they will be of no use to us once we have passed through death. They will then no longer have any meaning. After death we need thoughts, ideas, and feelings that do not relate to the physical world, because only those have meaning then.

Now, I would like to put this in a somewhat grotesque, paradoxical way. Do not be put off by the paradox; what I want to say will become clear immediately. Let us assume that someone refuses to have any thoughts that are not called forth by sensory perception. As soon as anything impinges on him and thoughts begin to develop, he says: I do not want you. I proceed only on the basis of what my eyes see and my ears hear. That is what I want to think about. Stop bothering me with anything else; I will not bother with it ... Such a person does not accumulate any strength that can be used after death. He is blind when entering the world between death and new birth.

Let us assume now that someone else has a lively imagination, but cannot be bothered to approach spiritual science and learn things slowly and gradually. He finds it much easier to develop ideas about the spiritual world from his imagination, to fantasize about the spiritual world. This person has ideas concerning the sense world as well as all kinds of fantasies about the realm of the spirit. Such an individual would not enter the spiritual world as a blind person, but will have soul forces that will enable him to see in the spiritual world. However, such people will be as we are when our vision in the physical world is impaired and we see things inaccurately as a result. Such inaccurate vision is a lot worse in the spiritual world than on the physical plane because there it leads to confusion at every turn. What I have just said, even if it seems grotesque at first, shows us that we need ideas reaching beyond the life of the senses if we really want to become citizens of the spiritual world, as we must. And unless we get our bearings from beyond the sense world, we will live in the spiritual world in a crippled state, as do those who take in only ideas related to the sensory realm and those who allow their imagination to run wild.

Various founders of religions appeared throughout history to prevent people from having thoughts triggered purely by physical objects or by fantasies about the spiritual world. If we look at these personalities and the teachings they gave humanity, we find that the aim of all these religious founders was to offer people ideas about the super-sensible world that would allow them to enter it healthy and whole, not crippled. The founders of our religions provided ideas that met the needs of their particular time and culture.

Our age is different from the past and requires us to grow up into mature human beings. Please do not take this in a superficial, merely external sense, but in a deeply inward one. We have to reach maturity and find the path into the spiritual world through our souls. The ancient founders of our religions spoke to a humanity that was not yet mature. They addressed people at a stage through which all our souls have also passed. These ancient religious leaders knew their times, and also knew that they could not speak in the same way to a humanity moving further toward the future. For humanity must develop toward maturity and independence.

If people of ancient times had either restricted themselves to sense impressions or had reached for the products of their imagination, in both cases they would have entered the spiritual world crippled or at the very least in a confused state. At that point a leader appeared, bringing true ideas from the spiritual world. People then said that they themselves did not gain access to the spiritual world through sensory perception or use of the imagination, but rather through Zarathustra, Buddha, or Krishna, who stimulated thoughts in them that allowed them to enter the realm of the spirit.⁵ In our time human beings must come of age, regardless of whether the ego causes confusion or blindness. The Mystery of Golgotha took place so that we can find the way into the spiritual world as independent beings. Religious leaders no longer appear in history as they did in earlier times.

Those who compare Christ to the ancient religious teachers do not understand anything about him. In the first place, Christ worked through a deed, the ancient religious leaders through their teachings. To describe him merely as a teacher of humanity means not knowing at all who Christ is. The essential thing about him is the deed he performed, which began as a consequence of his baptism by John and ended with the crucifixion on Golgotha. What was done there for humanity is spiritually all-important. What happened there is what can permeate human souls ever since then, namely, the experience St. Paul described as “Not I, but Christ in me.” Indeed, Christ has become the path into the spiritual world because he brought it into this world. He brought us the spiritual world we need if we are not to be crippled or blind after death.

It is quite possible these days to deny Christ and claim that there is no evidence that Christ lived in the physical world in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, people have even produced evidence showing there was no historical Christ. But with that they merely prove that they missed the point. If Christ had chiseled into a rock for all future generations, “I was here,” then those future generations would have known he existed from the sensory world, and they would not have needed to believe it. His deep significance, the possibility of redemption, is precisely that this was not the case, that we cannot comprehend him through our senses but have to accept him with the forces of the spirit. Seen in this light, we find Christ intimately connected with those things that even here on earth lift human beings beyond the sense-perceptible world into the spiritual realm. None of this exists for those who cannot raise themselves to the spiritual world, because they cannot escape their doubts.

In this context it can be a great relief for someone fully involved in modern culture, in science and art, to come across a view of Christ that is appropriate to our modern civilization, namely the anthroposophical view of Christ presented in spiritual science. Much can be learnt from it, for example, how to view the physical world correctly. Oh, the physical world—where is it headed these days? I hinted at some of these things recently in a public lecture, but now I can be more explicit.⁶ Of course, we have to admire materialist civilization and all the achievements of technology, industry, and so on. An immense amount of intellectual energy has flowed into these things; they have taken up a great deal of human energy. But who benefits from these intellectual efforts? Insofar as they satisfy the material needs of modern humanity, they serve Ahriman. Christ Jesus experienced the temptation by Ahriman. Ordinary human souls could certainly not survive the sudden shock of such an experience. For us the temptation has to be diluted. But as a consequence of this dilution of temptation, Ahriman can say to us: Yes, think only with the power of your science, with all those things you can discover through science applied to technology, industry, and so on. Use only those things for your thinking and apply them to nothing but physical experience; that suits me fine. It fits in well with my aims, says Ahriman, if you are unable to see me. You might well despise reason and knowledge, the supreme achievements of human beings; thus you are absolutely mine—at least as long as you do not see me. I will instill the drive in you to use reason and knowledge only for earthly things!

Something else is required to counterbalance the service we render Ahriman. It is therefore important that we gather everything modern technology and so on can accomplish to build something with it that is not to serve our outer existence, but only our spiritual life.

In ancient times, people presented sacrifices to the gods, the first fruits of the field and of the herd. I do not intend to talk about the meaning of sacrifice today, but you can see what it could signify presented in a form appropriate to modern times. When the first fruits had been sacrificed to the gods, the people partook of the remainder. Spiritual science is certainly not based on false asceticism. It will not be guilty of the absurdity of ranting and raving against modern culture with all its material blessings. On the contrary, it recognizes their value. But if it wants to avoid serving only Ahriman, it has to sacrifice something of the first fruits of this external material culture to the gods.

So you see, there is a profound thinking underlying the building that is growing outside on the hill at Dornach: We want to offer the first fruits of modern civilization to the gods. Everything is different now from the way it was in the times our souls passed through in previous incarnations. And we have to understand the nature of our current task just as we understood what we had to do in our earlier incarnations when we were guided by spiritual luminaries. That is especially difficult now because we have to take into account not only the nature of our time but also our soul qualities. In addition, we can no longer rely on the external authority that supported the founders of religions; we have to work with quite different forces. Christ was the Word; in the same way true spiritual science wishes to work only through the word and must not use any other means.

Such reflections give us an insight into the connection between the spiritual world and our world here on earth. And no matter where we begin, we see the Mystery of Golgotha radiating toward us as the heart and soul of such reflections. But we must not forget that we have to become mature, truly mature, so that we can understand what spiritual science is meant to be. We must never forget that it must exist because humanity must come of age.

It is completely true that humanity descended from higher spiritual regions and has moved away from the old atavistic clairvoyance by developing a world view based on reason and systematic thinking. We have to take this progress in evolution seriously. We must realize we live at a time when it is our mission to develop our thinking, to advance through our thinking, and to learn through studying. Spiritual science is our basis, our point of departure. We must try to immerse ourselves in these ideas so that they stimulate within us what our souls need in the future. What spiritual science offers can be understood by everyone. Those who claim one cannot understand the contents of spiritual science, but must believe it, speak without knowing how these things really are.

We must not be misled when we meet people who have not advanced by means of intellectual understanding, but have certain psychic abilities that seem to appear spontaneously. Based on our understanding of the mission of spiritual science, we know that souls can now think only because the clairvoyance of an earlier age has been suppressed. People with natural clairvoyance, which was not acquired through inner effort, must be seen as persons who have remained at an earlier evolutionary stage and who should therefore receive special care in our Society, rather than be considered particularly advanced. It would be an incorrect judgment if we were to consider such souls particularly mature, as having experienced particularly high incarnations. People with a natural gift of clairvoyance have gone through far less than those who are thinkers nowadays. These things have to be properly understood in our Society. Then it would be possible (and it is my duty to say this) for our Society to be a place where such souls with psychic powers can find care and be guided on the right path. Our Society could give them what they cannot get anywhere else: order in their soul. But to make that possible most of the members of our Society must have a profound inner knowledge of the mission of true spiritual science in the present. If that happened, then the case that so saddened us in recent days could not recur. I am referring to a member, who joined in the belief our Society would care for clairvoyant psychic forces, but then found here a captive audience and took on the role of a prophet. Such an event opens the door to all those things that, if they were to prevail, would turn our Society into the exact opposite of what it should be according to the intentions of the spiritual forces supporting it.

Unfortunately, we have had to suffer the case of ..., who came from a country in the north. He might have become a good member if he had worked quietly on developing his psychic powers. Instead, he was immediately surrounded by a kind of aura. He presented himself everywhere as a healer in a way we can only consider regrettable. It became necessary to announce that he could no longer be considered a member of our Society. For it would be turned into the exact opposite of what it should be if we failed to carefully draw attention to psychic phenomena that are not imbued with true spiritual power, which, after all, is the true power of Christ. Christ, not psychic powers, must work in us. These circumstances must be handled so as to make it clear that our Society will have nothing to do with this. It knows no other sanction than the one used in the last few days. Unfortunately, a step had to be taken we otherwise oppose in principle: a member had to be expelled.

This cannot be separated from a serious and worthy concept of the mission of the Anthroposophical Society. And certainly you will understand that it is only with great sorrow one lives through the events that had to be lived through here in the last few days. We are in principle opposed to all expulsions and yet could not avoid expelling someone in such a case. It will happen less and less frequently if our dear friends continue to take to heart the things that have been said so often and that were also the subject of tonight's talk. With that I will conclude my remarks, my dear friends, and entrust them to your souls.

• 1. Work on the construction of the first Goetheanum in Dornach. Started in 1913, it was destroyed by arson on New Year's Eve 1922/23.
• 2. Christian Morgenstern May 6, 1871 – March 31, 1914. See Lecture Two, note 8.
• 3. Christian Morgenstern, Alles um des Menschen Willen: Briefe, (Munich, Germany: Piper, 1962), letter of January 22, 1914, to a young girl, p. 398.
• 4. Morgenstern, Wir fanden einen Pfad. See Lecture Two, note 9.
• 5. Zarathustra, 628–551 B.C. Persian religious leader. Buddha, Siddharta Gautama, 563–483 B.C. Founder of Buddhism. Krishna, Indian deity, appears in Bhagavad-Gita as teacher of Arjuna.
• 6. Rudolf Steiner, “Homunkulus,” public lecture, Berlin, March 26, 1914, in Geisteswissenschaft als Lebensgut, vol. 63 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1959).

First of all, my dear friends, I want to say that I am very glad we are meeting here at this branch of the Anthroposophical Society today. I remember with great pleasure our meeting last year, and my greeting at the beginning of this lecture is as sincere and heartfelt as that memory.¹

Today I want to talk about a subject closely connected with the core of our anthroposophical movement. All the results of our spiritual movement are based on research that may be called clairvoyant. While I have often emphasized that our heart, mind, and feelings are primarily affected by anthroposophical truths, we cannot ignore that these truths depend on clairvoyant research, which is an expression of a soul condition different from that of everyday life. It appears to lead us away from the things that seem so important to us in daily life, but in reality, clairvoyant research leads us right into the heart of truly human life.

Today, I do not want to speak about the paths to clairvoyant research since I have already described them in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.² Rather, I would like to characterize the condition and mood of soul that develops as a consequence of this research.

Indeed we must bear in mind that if we follow the paths to clairvoyant research, we will feel completely different from our usual self. What happens to our soul when it becomes clairvoyant can be compared with our dreams, which are like surrogate clairvoyance. When we dream, we live in a world of images, which contains nothing of what we call “the sensation of touching an object outside us.” In our dreams there is usually nothing we can compare with normal ego consciousness. If any aspect of our ego does appear in our dreams, it seems to be separate from us, almost like another being outside us. We face our ego like a separate entity. Thus, we can speak of a doubling of the ego. However, in dreams we perceive only the part of ourselves that has separated, not the subjective ego. All statements apparently contradicting what I have just said can be traced to the fact that most people know of their dreams only from memory, and cannot remember that in the actual dream the subjective ego was extinguished.

The images of clairvoyant research resemble dreams because in both the sense of touch and the subjective ego are absent. A clairvoyant recalling his or her experiences must feel that the clairvoyant reality is permeable and, unlike physical objects, offers no resistance to touch. In the physical world we have ego awareness because we know: I am here, the object is outside me. However, in clairvoyant perception we are inside the object, not separated from what we perceive. Consequently, the individual objects are not fixed and distinct as physical ones, but are in continuous movement and transformation. Objects in the physical world are fixed because we can touch them and because they offer us boundaries, which objects of clairvoyant perception do not have. The same thing that causes our ego to fuse with the objects of clairvoyant perception also forces us to be very careful when we encounter what we call in the physical world another ego, another human being.

Let us first look at what happens when we encounter a person who has died through our clairvoyant faculties. Such an encounter can come about when the figure of the deceased approaches us in clairvoyant perception like a very vivid dream image, looking every bit as we remember the person looked in life. However, this is not the usual type of such encounters, but a rare exception.

Another possibility is that we clairvoyantly perceive a dead person who has taken on the form of either a living or another dead individual, and thus does not appear in his own form. The appearance of the deceased, then, is of very little relevance in identifying him. Perhaps we were particularly fond of another dead person or have a particularly close friendship with a living one; the deceased approaching us can then take on the form of either of those other individuals. In other words, we lack all the usual means of identifying the ego and appearance of a person in the physical world. It will help us find our way to remember that the appearance or form is not at all important; a being is meeting us in one form or another, and we need to note what this being does. If we take our time and carefully observe the image before us, we will realize that, based on everything we know about the individual in question, this person could not act the way he does in the clairvoyant sphere; his actions are totally out of character. We will often encounter a contradiction between the person appearing to us and his actions.

If we allow our feelings to accompany these actions, ignoring the individual's appearance, we will get a sense in the depths of our soul telling us what being we are actually dealing with. Let me repeat that we are guided by a feeling that rises up from the depths of our soul, for that is very important. The individual's appearance in the clairvoyant sphere seems to resemble a physical figure but can be as different from the being really present as the signs for the word “house” are from the actual house. Since we can read, we do not concentrate on the signs that make up the word “house” and do not describe the shape of the letters, but instead we get right to the concept “house.” In the same way, we learn in true clairvoyance to move from the figure we perceive to the actual being. That is why we speak of reading the occult script, in the true sense of the word. That is, we move inwardly and actively from the vision to the reality it expresses just as written words express a reality.

How can we develop this ability to go beyond the appearance, the immediate vision? We do so, above all, by looking at new ideas and concepts we will need if we want to understand the clairvoyant sphere—new, that is, in contrast to the ideas we use in the physical world.

In the physical world we look at an object or a being and say, quite rightly, I perceive that being, that object. We perceive the plant, mineral, and animal kingdoms, the realm of physical human beings, as well as clouds, mountains, rivers, stars, sun, and moon. The feeling expressed in the words “I perceive” undergoes a transformation when we enter the clairvoyant sphere.

Let me try to explain this with an analogy, though it may sound simplistic. If you were a plant, how would you relate to people perceiving you? If this plant had consciousness and could speak, it would have to say: People look at me, I am perceived by them. Of course, we say: I perceive the plant, but at its level of consciousness, the plant would have to say that it was perceived by human beings. It is this feeling of being perceived, being looked at, we must acquire in relation to the beings of the clairvoyant sphere. For example, concerning the beings of the first hierarchy, the angels, we must be aware that strictly speaking it is not correct to say “I perceive an angel,” but we have to say “I feel an angel perceiving me.”

Based on our Copernican world view, we know full well that the sun does not move. Nevertheless, we say that it rises and moves across the sky, thus contradicting our better knowledge. Similarly, in everyday language we can say that we see an angel. But that is not the truth. We would actually have to say that we feel ourselves seen or perceived by an angel. If we said we experience the being of an angel or of a dead person and can feel it, we would speak the truth from the clairvoyant point of view.

Perhaps an example from clairvoyant observation will help you understand this. More than ten years ago, at the beginning of our work with spiritual science, a dear friend of ours worked with us for a short time.³ This individual possessed not only enthusiasm for what we could give her in the early stages of spiritual science, but also a profound artistic sensitivity and understanding. One could not help but love this person, a love that may well be described as objective because of her qualities. Having worked with us for a relatively short time and having learned a great deal about the results of spiritual science, she left the physical world. There is no need to go into the next four or five years after her death, so let me get directly to what happened after that. In 1909, we presented our mystery plays in Munich, preceded, to our great delight, by Children of Lucifer by our highly respected friend Edouard Schuré.⁴ Whatever you may think about the way the plays were produced then and later, we had to present them the way we did. The circumstances under which we had to work on the performances were such that we needed an impulse from the spiritual world, an impulse that also included the artistic aspect we wanted to incorporate. Now, I can assure you that even at that time, in 1909, and even more so in later years, I always felt a specific spiritual impulse as I was working on the arrangements for the performances.

You see, when we have work to do in the physical world, we need not only intellect and skills but also the strength of our muscles. Our muscles objectively help us; they are given to us, unlike the intellectual capacities we ourselves dwell in. Now, in dealing with matters of the spirit we need forces from the spiritual world to combine with our own, just as we need the strength of our muscles for physical action. In the case I mentioned, the impulse from the individual who had left the physical world in 1904 entered more and more into our artistic work on the Munich plays. To describe what happened, I would have to say the impulses from this individual came down from the spirit plane and flowed into my intentions, into my work. She was the patron of our work.

We develop the right feelings toward the dead if we become aware that their spiritual gaze—if I may use that expression—and their powers focus on us; they look at us, act in us, and add to our strength.

To experience such a spiritual fact in the right way, we need to develop a very specific type of selflessness and a capacity for love. That is why I stressed that one could love that person objectively, as it were, because of her qualities; one had to love her because she was as she was. A subjective love, a love arising out of personal needs, can easily be egotistical and can potentially keep us from finding the right relationship to such a dead individual. The difference between the right love, the selfless love we have for such a person, and selfish love becomes perfectly obvious in clairvoyant experience.

Let us assume such a person would want to help us after her death, but we cannot develop true selfless love for her. Her spiritual gaze, her spiritual will streaming toward us would then be like a burning sensation, causing a piercing, burning feeling in our soul. If we can feel and maintain a selfless love, this stream, her spiritual gaze as it were, flows into our soul like a feeling of warm mildness and pours itself into our thoughts, imagination, feeling, and willing. It is out of this feeling that we recognize who the dead person is and not on the basis of his or her appearance, because the dead may manifest in the guise of a person we feel close to at the moment. The form in which the beings of the higher world appear to us—and after death we are all beings of a higher, spiritual world—depends on our subjective nature, on what we habitually see, think, and feel. The reality is what we feel for the being manifest before us, how we receive what comes to us from this being. Regardless of what Joan of Arc said about the appearance of the higher beings in her visions, the occultist who is able to investigate these things knows that it was always the genius of the French nation who stood behind them.⁵

I described how we can feel the gaze of spiritual beings resting upon us and their will flowing into our souls. To learn this is analogous to learning to read on the physical plane. Those who merely want to describe their visions would be like people describing the shape of the letters on a page rather than their meaning. This shows you how easy it is to have preconceived notions about the experiences in the spiritual realm. Naturally, it seems most obvious to attach great importance to the description of what the vision looked like. However, what really matters is what lies behind the veil of perception and is expressed in the images of the vision.

Thus, in the course of occult development, the soul immerses itself in specific moods and inner states different from those of our everyday life. We have entered the world of the hierarchy of angels and the hierarchy, or we could also say hierarchies, of the dead as soon as our occult exercises have brought us to the stage where the sense of touch characteristic of the physical world no longer exists, and where a person's appearance is no longer characteristic of the I concerned. Then our thinking changes and we no longer have thoughts in the sense we have them here in the physical world. In that world, every thought takes on the form of an elemental being. In the physical world, our thoughts can agree or contradict each other. In this other world we enter, thoughts encounter other thoughts as real beings, either loving or hating each other. We begin to feel our way into a world of many thought beings. And in those living thought beings, we really feel what we usually call “life.” Here life and thinking are united, whereas they are completely separate in the physical world.

When we speak on the physical plane and tell our thoughts to someone, we have the feeling that our thoughts come from our soul, that we have to remember them at this particular moment. Speaking as a true occultist and not someone who just tells his experiences from memory, we will feel that our thoughts arise as living beings. We must be glad if we are blessed at the right moment with the approach of a thought as a real being.

When you express your thoughts in the physical world, for example, as a lecturer, you will find it easier to give a talk for the thirtieth time than you did the first time. If, however, you speak as an occultist, thoughts always have to approach you and then depart again. Just as someone paying you the thirtieth visit had to make his way to you thirty times, the living thought we express for the thirtieth time has to come to us thirty times as it did the first time; our memory is of absolutely no use here.

If you express an idea on the physical level and someone is sitting in a corner thinking, “I don't like that nonsense, I hate it,” you will not be particularly bothered by it. You have prepared your ideas and present them regardless of the positive or negative thoughts of someone in the audience. But if as an esotericist you let thoughts approach you, they could be delayed and kept away by someone who hates them or who hates the speaker. And the forces blocking that thought must be overcome because we are dealing with living beings and not merely with abstract ideas.

These two examples show that as soon as we enter the sphere of clairvoyance, we are immersed in living and weaving thoughts. It is as if these thoughts are no longer subjective and as if you yourself are no longer within yourself, as if you are living outside in the wide world. When you are in this world of living and weaving thoughts, you are in the hierarchy of angels. And just as our physical world is everywhere filled with air, the world of the hierarchy of angels is filled with the mild warmth I spoke about earlier that the beings of this hierarchy pour out. When our inner development has brought us to the stage where we can live in this spiritual atmosphere of streaming mildness, we feel the spiritual eyes of the hierarchy of angels resting on our souls.

Now, in our earthly life, we have certain ideals and think about them abstractly. As we think of them, we feel obligated to pursue these ideals. In the clairvoyant sphere, however, there are no abstract ideals. There ideals are living beings of the hierarchy of angels and flow through spiritual space, looking at us with warmth.

In the physical world, we may have ideals, know them well, and yet we may not do anything to apply them. Our emotions, and perhaps passions, can tempt us to shirk them. However, if we knowingly ignore an ideal in the clairvoyant sphere, we feel the spiritual gaze of a being of the hierarchy of angels directed at us with reproach, and this reproach burns. In the spiritual world, ignoring an ideal is thus a reality, and a being of the hierarchy of angels reproaches us. Their gaze makes us feel the reproach; it is the reproach we feel.

You see, learning to develop a real feeling for ideals is one way of entering the world of the hierarchy of angels. Limiting our consciousness to the physical plane may lead us to think that nothing will happen if we are too lazy to act on our ideals. However, we can learn to feel that if we do not act on an ideal, then, regardless of other consequences, the world becomes different from what it would have been had we followed our ideal. We are on the way to the hierarchy of angels when we begin to see that not acting on our ideals is something real, and when we can transform this insight into a genuine feeling. Transforming and vitalizing our feelings allows our souls to grow into the higher worlds.

Through continued esoteric training, we can rise to an even higher level, that of the hierarchy of archangels. If we ignore the angels, we feel reproach. With the archangels we feel reproach as well as a real effect on our being. The strength and power of the archangels works through our I when we live in their world.

For example, a few months ago we lost a very dear friend when he left the physical plane. A profound poet, he had quickly found his way into the anthroposophical world view in the last five years, and the feelings it evoked in him are beautifully reflected in his recent poetry.⁶ From the time he joined us, and even before that, he had been struggling with an infirm and deteriorating body. The more his body deteriorated, the more his soul was filled with poetry that reflected our world view. Only a short time has elapsed since his death, and so one cannot yet say that this individual possesses a clearly existing consciousness. Nevertheless, the first stages of his development in the existence after death can be seen. The astral body, now separated from the physical and living in the spiritual world, reveals the most wonderful tableaux of cosmic development as we understand it in spiritual science. Having left the deteriorated physical body, the astral body has become so illuminated, comparatively speaking, that it can present the clairvoyant observer with a complete picture of cosmic evolution.

Let me use an analogy to explain what I mean. We can love nature and admire it, and still appreciate a beautiful painting that recreates what we have seen in nature. Similarly, we can be uplifted when what we have seen in the clairvoyant sphere lights up again, as a cosmic painting, so to speak, in an astral body of a person who has died. The astral body of our departed friend reveals after death what it absorbed, at first unconsciously but later also consciously, in the course of his anthroposophical development when the beings of the hierarchy of archangels worked actively on the poetical transformation of his anthroposophical thoughts and ideas.

Our progress in our esoteric development can be called mystical, because it is initially the inner progress of the soul. We transform our ordinary personality and gradually reach a new state. This step-by-step growth of the soul is mystical progress because at first it is experienced inwardly. As soon as we can perceive the mildness looking down from the spiritual world, we are objectively in the world of the angels, which reveals itself to us. And as soon as we can recognize that real forces of strength and power enter into us, we are in the realm of the archangels. With each stage of inner mystical progress we have to enter another world.

However, if we fail to develop selflessness and reach the stage of living in the world of the angels while remaining selfish and unloving, then we carry the self intended for the physical world into their realm. Instead of feeling the mild gaze and will of the angels upon us, we feel that other spiritual powers are able to ascend through us. Instead of gazing at us from outside, they have been released by us, shall we say, from their underworld while we were raised to a higher world. Instead of being overshadowed, or rather illuminated, by the world of the angels, we experience the luciferic beings that emerge from us.

Then, if we reach the stage of mystical development allowing us to enter the world of the archangels—without, however, having first developed the wish to receive by grace the influences of the spiritual world, we carry our self up into their realm. As a result, instead of being strengthened and imbued with the power of the archangels, the beings of the ahrimanic world emerge from us and surround us.

At first glance, the idea that the world of Lucifer appears in the realm of the angels and the world of Ahriman in that of the archangels seems terrible. However, there is really nothing awful about this. Lucifer and Ahriman are in any case higher beings than we are. Lucifer can be described as an archangel left behind at an earlier stage of evolution, Ahriman as a spirit of personality also left behind at an earlier stage. The terrible thing is not that we encounter Lucifer and Ahriman, but that we encounter them without recognizing them for who they are. Encountering Lucifer in the world of the angels really means encountering the spirit of beauty, the spirit of freedom. But the all-important thing is that we recognize Lucifer and his hosts as soon as we enter the world of the angels. The same is true of Ahriman in the realm of the archangels. Lucifer and Ahriman unleashed in the higher worlds is terrible only if we do not recognize them as we release them, because then they control us without our knowledge. It is important that we face them consciously.

When we have advanced in our mystical development to the level of living in the world of the angels and want to continue there with really fruitful occultism, we have to look for Lucifer as soon as we expect the spiritual gaze of the angels to rest on us. Lucifer must be present—and if we cannot find him, he is within us. But it is very important that Lucifer is outside us in this realm, so that we can face him.

These facts about Lucifer and Ahriman, angels and archangels, explain the nature of revelation in the higher worlds. From our viewpoint in the physical world, we are easily led to believe that Lucifer and Ahriman are evil powers. But when we enter the higher world, this no longer has any meaning. In the clairvoyant sphere, Lucifer and Ahriman have to be present just as much as the angels and archangels. However, we do not perceive them the same way. We identify the angels and archangels not by their appearance, but we know the angels by the mildness that flows from them into us, and recognize the archangels by allowing their strength and power to flow into our feeling and will. Lucifer and Ahriman appear to us as figures, merely transposed into the spiritual world; we cannot touch them, but we can approach them as spiritual projections of the physical world. Clearly, it is important that we learn in our mystical clairvoyant development to see forms in the higher world and to be aware that we are seen, that a higher will focuses on us.

You see, higher development does not consist merely in acquiring clairvoyant faculties, but in developing a certain state of soul, a certain attitude or relationship to the beings of the higher world. This new attitude and state of soul must be developed hand in hand with the training of our clairvoyant faculties. In other words, we must learn not only to see in the spiritual world but also to read in it. Reading is not meant here in the narrow sense of a simple learning process, but as something we acquire through transforming our feelings and sensations. It is important to keep in mind that a split of our personality occurs when clairvoyance begins, and we reach a revelation of the higher worlds. Our earthly personality is left behind, and a new one is acquired on ascending into a higher world. And just as the beings of the higher hierarchies look at us in the higher world, so we perceive our own ordinary personality from a higher perspective. Our higher self discards the lower one and observes it. So, to make valid statements about the higher worlds we had better wait until we are able to say: That is you; the person you see in your clairvoyant vision is yourself. “That is you” on the higher level corresponds to “this is I” on the physical one.

Now remember when you were eight or thirteen or fifteen years old and try to reconstruct from your memory a small part of your life at that time. Try to recall as vividly as possible your thinking in those years. Then concentrate on your current feelings about the girl or boy you were at eight, thirteen, or fifteen. As soon as we move from the physical level to the higher world, the present moment we live in now becomes a memory of the kind we have just recalled. We look back at our current existence on the physical level and at what we may still become during the remainder of our physical life in the same way you look back to your experiences at eight, thirteen, or fifteen from your vantage point in the present moment.

Everything we consider part of ourselves on the physical level, such as our feelings, thoughts, ideas, and actions, becomes a memory as soon as we enter the higher world. We look down at the physical world and become a memory to ourselves when we live in the higher world. We have to keep our experiences in the higher worlds separate from those in the physical realm, just as we distinguish between our present situation and an earlier one. Imagine a person who is forty years old and vividly remembers the feelings and abilities he or she had as an eight-year-old boy or girl. For instance, the person might be reading a book now, at the age of forty, and all of a sudden he or she begins to relate to the book as an eight-year-old would. That would be a confusion of the two attitudes, the two states of soul, and is analogous to what happens when we confuse our state of soul on the physical level with what is required in the higher worlds.

Of course, this has nothing to do with the fact that every unbiased person can understand what I say about the higher worlds; in other words, we do not merely have to believe these descriptions, but we can understand them if we approach them without preconceived ideas. People may object that we cannot describe the higher worlds with concepts, thoughts, and ideas from the physical world because the former are completely different from the latter. This objection makes as much sense as saying that we cannot give people an idea of what we mean by writing h-o-u-s-e; for them to understand that concept, we have to bring them a house.

We talk about physical facts and objects by means totally independent of the object or fact. So we can also describe phenomena of the spiritual world with what we understand on the physical plane. However, we cannot understand the higher worlds with our everyday concepts and ideas, but need to acquire others and expand our thinking. People who honestly tell us about the higher world must also extend our concepts beyond our everyday life; they must give us concepts that are new and different and yet comprehensible on the physical plane.

People find it difficult to understand genuine spiritual science and serious esotericism because they are so reluctant to expand their concepts. They want to understand the higher world and its revelations with the ideas they already have and don't want to create new ones. When people in our materialistic age hear lectures on the spiritual world, they believe all too easily that the esoteric world can be understood simply by looking at it. They think the shapes there may be slightly more delicate and more nebulous than in the physical world, but similar nevertheless. It may seem inconvenient to some that the serious occultist is expected to do more than merely follow instructions on how to see angels. A change in thinking is necessary, and the concept “angel” must include that we are perceived by them, that their spiritual gaze is focused on us.

Mystical development, or ascending to the higher worlds, cannot be separated from enriching and giving greater scope to our ideas, feelings, and soul impulses. To understand the higher worlds, we must not let our life of ideas remain as impoverished as it is on the physical plane.

To provide esoteric help for this enrichment, we are constructing our modest building in Dornach in a completely new style. That building is, of course, nowhere near the ideal, but it is a humble beginning. After all, we have only limited means at our disposal, despite the fact that our friends have done everything within their power for this project.

The spiritual impulses behind the building styles that developed in the third, the fourth, and in the current fifth post-Atlantean epoch included the task of guiding humanity to knowledge of the physical world. For example, Egyptian architecture initiated this development with its succinct geometrical forms. Greco-Roman architecture is like a marriage of soul and spirit with etheric and physical body. Here soul and spirit on the one hand and etheric body and physical body on the other connect in a state of complete equilibrium. The rising, pointed arches of the Gothic style are the first architectural attempt to rise again from the physical into the spiritual world.

If anthroposophy is to be represented in a building the next step must be to bring to life the living and weaving thought patterns themselves, flowing, and pouring into space. Then we will see in physical form what Imagination and Inspiration reveal directly of the spiritual world. That is why the forms of the Dornach building are such that it is pointless to ask in materialist fashion what they symbolize and what their shapes stand for. They have to be taken on their own merit, since they are nothing more than immediate spiritual experiences poured out into spatial forms. We have attempted to transform everything that can be seen and experienced in the spirit into artistic form. So if people ask what a form stands for, they have misunderstood the building; for every form signifies only itself, just as our hands or head stand only for themselves and nothing else. Such a question also indicates a complete misunderstanding of our position in regard to occultism. We will be glad to leave behind the old theosophical nonsense of examining every fairy tale, every figure, and every myth for what it signifies and symbolizes.

All our forms really exist in the spiritual world and therefore express only themselves and nothing else. They are not symbols, but spiritual realities. You will not find a single pentagram throughout the building, no form of a pentagram, nothing to make you wonder what this or that form means. At most, there is one place where subtle forms could be interpreted as a pentagram, but so can every five-petaled flower. People may ask what our fourteen pillars mean, which are not shaped as pentagrams, but are five-sided for aesthetic reasons. They may wonder what the pillars supporting the cupolas mean besides representing spatial relations perceptible in the spiritual world. In reply we can only point out how materialistic our age is when even spiritual intentions must be clothed in materialist garments.

Our building will be understood if people stop asking what it symbolizes and instead think about what it is. They will understand our building when they realize it is better not to use any of the usual terms and the old verbal images to help our materialist age comprehend it. Spiritual science can at most be a synthesis of religions; unlike the ancient religions, it does not build temples, but rather a structure that expresses its innermost nature. This building can only be understood gradually, and only if we do not apply old words to this new development.

We know only too well that we can realize our intentions in Dornach only in the most modest, rudimentary way. But I ask only that you make a real effort to understand this humble beginning from the perspective and significance of our spiritual science. Try to understand what this simple beginning, paid for with considerable sacrifices, is aiming at. Any other attitude would be most disheartening.

Enough grand words and pompous phrases have been bandied about in the so-called occult movement. All we want is that even if our way of expressing things no longer exists fifty years from now, people will still say of our movement that it endeavored with every fiber to be totally sincere and honest. And the more modestly and simply, but thus perhaps the more objectively, we discuss what we wish to do, the better we serve our cause. Every word that is superfluous or returns to the old, convenient concepts does untold damage to what we are striving to achieve—please excuse me for saying this—honestly. If people understand us in this way, then perhaps the mood will arise that we need if we are really, in December at the earliest, to inaugurate our modest building without pomp and fuss.⁷ The mood we need will be there only if we concentrate on our goals, even if we do not create a stir in our materialist age.

Please accept these words in the spirit of the serious intentions of our movement. They must fill our souls if this spiritual impulse is really to take root in our age. There is a real need for an honest spiritual movement that truly promotes the mystical life of the soul and allows revelations of the higher worlds to flow into this materialist age. Only when our friends understand this purpose and attitude of our spiritual movement, then and only then shall we be able to fulfill the task given us by the wise, guiding individualities in the spiritual world.

Based on what I have tried to explain today, I will speak to you the day after tomorrow about the progress in our understanding of Christ through the ages and about the position of our movement concerning the Christ.⁸

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, Die Welt des Geistes und ihr Hereinragen in das physische Dasein, Vol. 150 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1972), lecture of May 5, 1913. There are no transcripts of the lectures of May 4 and 9, 1913, in Paris.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, repr., (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press 1986).
• 3. Steiner here refers to the actress Maria von Strauch-Spettini, 1847–1904. See Lecture Two, note 7.
• 4. Edouard Schuré, French writer. His play Children of Lucifer was performed in German in Munich on August 22, 1909, under Rudolf Steiner's direction. See Steiner The East in the Light of the West and Schuré, Children of Lucifer, both in one volume, (Blauvelt NY: Spiritual Science Library, 1986).
• 5. Joan of Arc, 1412–1431, French national heroine and saint.
• 6. Morgenstern, see Lecture Two, note 8.
• 7. Due to complications and delays caused by World War I (1914–1918), the building neared completion only in 1920. The inauguration ceremony never took place because of the fire that destroyed the Goetheanum. A “provisional inauguration” took place on September 26, 1920, on the eve of the first event held in the building, the “first anthroposophical academic course,” which lasted from September 27 to October 16, 1920.
• 8. Rudolf Steiner, Vorstufen zum Mysterium von Golgotha, Vol. 152 in the Collected Works, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1964), Lecture of May 27, 1914.